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I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

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It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. ...more

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I mi...more

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

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How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transce...more

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the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

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Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot liv...more

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Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, wh...more

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those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers...

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I mi...more

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While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, w...more

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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

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Since the age of five I had been one of those people who was an indefatigable reader, more inclined to go off by myself with a book than do any of the...more

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I read and reread and recommended and rarely rejected, became one of those readers who will read trashy stories as long as they're not too terrible--w...more