“If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read.”

“We get one chance at this life. We have one body, one mind, and one life to live. Reading provides us with a vicarious experience of others' lives.”

“The lesson I have learned is that a failure to cultivate the imagination leads to an unintended neglect of the imaginative literature of Scripture, and this in turn leads to some degree of spiritual atrophy. For Christians, the stories of Revelation are not optional reading. Nor are they child's play. Imaginative literature--the kind of literature that invites us to see in our imaginations what we cannot see with our eyes--is an important part of the Christian's literary diet. It challenges our idols. It challenges what is false and trivial in our lives.”

“Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).”

“A lot of people assume you can think better with a slow diet of books, but that will not be the case for every reader. I prefer inundation.”

“Stories arrest us. Parents use stories to capture the attention of active children. Preachers use stories to capture the attention of sleepy adults.”

“I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”