“School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.”

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”

“The first thing that reading teaches us is how to be alone.”

“I've always enjoyed cleaning. Even though they tried to teach us laziness in school.”

“The teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teaching were removed.”

“It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which we did not know how to appreciate, and the true extent of which we come to realize only through the book.”