“That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you'll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guides, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such "strategies" as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody's favorite thing: homework.”

“if you want to convince children of the power of books, don’t tell them stories are good. Tell them a good story.”

“Everybody has a story, Alison," he said. "Everybody has things they need to hide--sometimes even from themselves.”

“His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.”

“Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems to open up to people passing by. An outdoor reader shares the pulse of a timeless urban conversation between the world and the written word.”

“If you read to your kids, you'll make readers out of them, partly because they'll associate reading with good parent-time.”

“Life. It’s a funny thing. Some want it, some throw it away. Some cling, some have it stolen from them. It’s terrifying… which is maybe why I was drawn to Fear in the first place.”