“The availability of books is not the same as reading them, nor reading the same as understanding them.”

“Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”

“I'm not mad. I've just read different books.”

“CUSTOMER: Hi.BOOKSELLER: Hi there, how can I help?CUSTOMER: Could you please explain Kindle to me.BOOKSELLER: Sure. It’s an e-reader, which means you download books and read them on a small hand-held computer.CUSTOMER: Oh OK, I see. So . . . this Kindle. Are the books on that paperback or hardback?”

“Despite his first, the study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlor game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilized existence. But it was not the core, whatever Dr. Leavis said in his lectures.”

“In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.”

“The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”