books

who gets the rare opportunity of spotting a treasure of memories lying among masses, stepping back to stroke it with a secret smile as your mind wanders back to those sleepless yet ecstatic nights you had spent together?only............a book lover.

The sessions with Mr. Dubois continued, but it was in the private parlor of Abigail Braddock that Sarah Biddle received the greatest knowledge, for in Mrs. Braddock's private parlor Sarah Biddle learned not only to read books, but also to love them.

To be perfectly honest, I think she became sick of Society during her debut season. Better to lock herself in her room with her books than to spend her life paying calls and going to balls.

I rushed to the living room to protect myself from I don't know what, behind my best friend, a book.

The boy was a model pupil, forgettable and easily forgotten, and he sent much of his spare time in the back of the English class where there were shelves of old paperbacks, and in the school library, a large room filled with books and old armchairs, where he read stories as enthusiastically as some children ate.

Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist. (From the short story, "Charity".)

Fiction was a way for me to escape into another world. I would lose myself and all my shame, insecurity, and fear in those books. I would let time slip away in the pages of other worlds. Reading was a life long gift I grew to cherish.

And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

I was happy in the library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds--this was a comfort to me.

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books__ut they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy. I was as excited as I__e ever been in my life, in that library: scoring new books the minute they came in; ordering books I__ heard of__hen waiting, fevered, for them to arrive, like they were the word Christmas.

I was behind, but now I'm below. Hopefully, they'll have books wherever I go...

Never interrupt someone who is reading because they__e no longer in your world.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because the just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years--about twelve of them--to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood.

A writer who doesn__ read is like a director who doesn__ watch movies.

I love the paradise of being between the pages of a book.

Reading & Thinking Breeds limitless progress.

we became the books we read.