“I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.”

“We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.”

“I read books like I read people. I look past the imperfections and at the heart behind them.”

“People are like books, and the world is like a library. Some believe that it is important to be known with the most possible people, and have what we call superficial relationships with mass amounts of people. If you go in a library it's not important to see the cover of the most possible books, what you will learn if to get out a pair of interesting books and take a good amount of time to read them. Those who want to know the most possible only see the cover of many books, maybe they get as far as a few pages through the books, but they never get to read some of them. So there is actually no point in finding the books in the 1st place.”

“The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry;The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy;The books that people talk about we never can recall;And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.”

“Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.”