“What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.”

“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.”

“Books, to the reading child, are so much more than books -- they are dreams and knowledge, they are a future and a past.”

“She'd covered the bed in books, five of them spread out across Dad's side. She once told me she liked to read the first chapters and then dream the rest. Perhaps she was dreaming them right now.”

“And in his dream, Coyotito was reading from a book as large as a house, with letters as big as dogs, and the words galloped and played on the book.”

“I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom. ”