i want to buy a book, a book that i’ve never heard of, never read. look at the cover, read the back, flip through the pages. bring it home. grab a highlighter, and begin to read the book. every time there is a sentence, a word, a phrase that i can relate to, i will highlight it. then, once i am done the book, i will be able to flip through it and see exactly how i was feeling each day that i was reading. it would be like a diary, but written in someone else’s words

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"If you don’t like to read you haven’t found the right book."

— J. K. Rowling

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"If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print."

— The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Lewis Buzbee

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"We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else’s mind."

— How Reading Changed My Life, Anna Quindlen

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"Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy."

— Charlaine Harris

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I love that feeling you get when you don’t remember that you’re reading. When you’re so captured by a book that you forget you’re reading the words. All you see is the descriptions and conversations that being to play out like a movie in your head. You don’t even think about it. Then before you know it, you’ve read 100 pages without realizing it. That’s probably the best feeling in the world. 

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"Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else."

— Mark Twain

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"I never understood people who don’t have bookshelves."

— George Plimpton

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"Books are never harmless… they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future."

— The Philosopher’s Kiss, Peter Prange

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"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

— C.S. Lewis

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"We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today."

— Cory Doctorow

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"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."

— Stephen King

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"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance."

— A.E. Newton

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"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

— Franz Kafka

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"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you."

— Mortimer Adler

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