Addiction?

A quote in an e-mail from Bill (“Reading is the last act of secular prayer.” - Richard Powers) and a Facebook post by Deborah (“Once you learn to read you will be forever free." --Frederick Douglass) made this happen. Reading is my crutch, my education, my solace, my inspiration, my fear, my religion and my basis for home decoration; in other words a big part of my life:

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer J. Adler

A library is a hospital for the mind.
Anonymous

Read books. They are good for us.
Natalie Goldberg

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
Gaston Bachelard

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Henry Ward Beecher

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.
Groucho Marx

Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.
Groucho Marx

Read in order to live.
Gustave Flaubert

Don't join the book burners. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.
Atwood H. Townsend

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature,
to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.
Mccosh

Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.
It is not true that we have only one life to lead; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.
S. I. Hayakawa

The closest we will ever come to an orderly universe is a good library.
Ashleigh Brilliant

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.
I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.
Malcolm X

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
Yevgeny Zamyatin

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf

When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerers and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards -- their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble -- the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading. (1932)
Virginia Woolf

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David Thoreau





In books lies the soul of the whole past time.
Thomas Carlyle

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past,
the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
Amy Lowell

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape.
It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
Arthur Christopher Benson

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.
Emily Dickinson

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith

A good book is the purest essence of a human soul.
Thomas Carlyle

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus T. Cicero

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges

I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
John Keats

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Lady M. W. Montague

The libraries have become my candy store.
Juliana Kimball

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
John Milton


One half who graduate from college never read another book.
Herbert True

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Chinese proverb

Read, read, read.
William Faulkner

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.
Desiderius Erasmus 1466-1536

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Austin Phelps

My home is where my books are. (1909)
Ellen Thompson

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Henry Ward Beecher

Books do furnish a room.
Anthony Powell