How Reading Changed My Life

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”

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

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

“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, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.”

“All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers.”