“I pledge to set out to live a thousand lives between printed pages.I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal.I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world.I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day.I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close.”

“The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean.”

“I pledge to keep you safe.”

“Papa said marriage is not kept by affection but by a pledge. Affection does not beget the pledge; the pledge begets the affection. When you share a life and a home and a bed with someone, you become soul mates as surely as cream and effort produce butter....And so I began to imagine my life with James Luddy. I imagined being butter.”

“If you feel . . . that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms and sirens and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, 'The world is quiet here,' as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.”

“My whole life has been pledged to this meeting with you...”