There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.

And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.

Even the most ill-formed words, set to paper, are a great blessing.

I thought of all the summer evenings I'd spent sitting in the chairs under the trees beside the trailer, reading books that helped me escape Creek View, at least for a little while. Magical kingdoms, Russian love triangles, and the March sisters couldn't have been further away from the trailer park.

King Arthur's Knights had been the first book Arthur had read late at night under the covers with a torch...it was he supposed, thinking back on it, the first book that had showed him what reading was really all about.

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She’s a complete bibliophile, so I’ve pretty much grown up around libraries and books.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he’s old enough to read it.

Oh, how scary and wonderful it is that words can change our lives simply by being next to each other.

It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself - and he never asked anybody else to read to him.

Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.

To be allowed, no, invited into the private lives of strangers, and to share their joys and fears, was a chance to exchange the Southern bitter wormwood for a cup of mead with Beowulf or a hot cup of tea and milk with Oliver Twist.

I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.

To dream of afar, to chase a star, to believe in Captain Hook. To dance with bears and have no cares, this is the magic of a book.

I believe books should be like a prime rib steak ~ good and thick.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

He loved books, those undemanding but faithful friends.

Mommy. Do you ever wish a book will never end?

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.

Reading's ability to beam you up to a different world is a good part of the reason why people like me do it in the first place---because dollar for dollar, hour per hour, it's the most expedient way to get from our proscribed little "here" to an imagined, intriguing there". Part time machine, part Concorde, part ejector seat, books are our salvation.