Learn as much by writing as by reading.

To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one.

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

A book holds a house of gold.

Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

The books we read help to shape who we are. Reading offers us, as children, our first independence- allowing us to travel far beyond the confines of our immediate world. Books introduce us to great figures in history, narratives that stir our spirit, fictions that tug us out of ourselves and into the lives of a thousand others, and visions of every era through which human beings have lived. And in the process of stretching who we are, books also connect us to all others- of our own or previous times- who have read what we've read. In the community of readers, we instantly become linked to those who share our love for specific characters or passages.

A well-composed book,' says Caroline Gordon, 'is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.'