Some of my favorite quotations about books and reading:
“I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations – such is a pleasure beyond compare.”
– Kenko Yoshida
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
– Stephen King
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.”
– Helen Keller
“I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters, easy to live with, always at my command.”
– Francesco Petrarch
“I’m old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
– Wyszlawa Szymborska
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
– W. Somerset Maugham
“A good book is an event in my life.”
– Stendhal
“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“A home without books is like a room without windows.”
– Heinrich Mann
“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
– Adrienne Rich
Image: PiersNye, Gate to Balliol Fellows’ Garden on Frosty December Day via Flickr