“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”

“The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading.”

“Let us begin with a simple line,Drawn as a child would draw it, To indicate the horizon,More real than the real horizon,Which is less than line,Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.The line ravishes the page with implicationsOf white earth, white sky!”

“Reading activates and exercises the mind.Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts.Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined.”

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”

“No matter how an individual views Satan, whether they believe that he is a real character or that he is just the product of literary scholars and imaginations, no one can deny that each one of us has an aspect of the devil within us. By studying the character and nature of Satan, we learn about ourselves; and the more we know about ourselves, the better we can fight our own personal demons—metaphorical or otherwise—in order to create a better tomorrow”