“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 transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.”

“Mary-Lynnette: "You have not read 'Pride and Prejudice'."Ash: "Why not?"Mary-Lynnette: "Because Jane Austen was a human."Ash: "How do you know?"Mary-Lynnette: "Well Jane Austen was a woman, and you're a chauvinist pig."Ash: "Yes, well, that I can't argue.”

“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”

“Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.”

“Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.”

“Reading is how we learn to attach ourselves to ourselves, and to others, and to the world: reading inhabits us with the tendrils of love.”