"Today's reader is tomorrow's leader." – Margaret Fuller
"A word after a word, a word after a word is power." – Margaret Atwood
"When you look at a book, you hear someone else's voice, perhaps someone who died 1000 years ago. Reading is traveling in time." - Carl Sagan
"Show me a family of readers and I'll show you the people who move the world." - Napoleon Bonaparte
"The book is a garden, an orchard, a barn, a party, by the way, a company, a consultant, a multitude of consultants." – Charles Baudelaire
"Looking back, I was once again so impressed with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, if I were trying to establish myself in the world, I would do it again by reading, just as I have done until now. I did it when I was young." – Maya Angelou
"Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, it should be presented as a gift." – Kate DiCamillo
"I think books are like people because they'll be there when you need them most." – Emma Thompson
"Until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read at school, I discovered that you could be crazy and happy and have a good life without being like everyone else." – John Waters
"Books are portable magic like no other." – Stephen King
"Books are mirrors; in them you only see what's inside of you." – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Think before you speak. Read before you think. – Fran Lebowitz
"Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the reading-only week." – Lena Dunham
"If you don't like reading, you haven't found the right book." – J.K. Rowling
A room without a book is like a body without a soul. – Cicero
"Reading all good books is like talking to the best minds of past centuries." – Rene Descartes
"That's the thing with books. They let you travel without moving your feet." – Jhumpa Lahiri
"I love that every book - any book - has its own journey. You open it and you go..." – Sharon Creech
"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in taking the place of another for a while." – Malorie Blackman
"Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly convinces us that we are someone else, destroying the illusion that we are permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we are saved!) other people are real again and we are fond of them." – George Saunders
"A great book should give you many experiences and some fatigue at the end. You live several lives while you read it." -William Styron
"I think a big part of the purpose of serious fiction is to give the reader, like all of us, stuck in his own head, an imaginary access to other selves." – David Foster Wallace
"Reading is an escape and the opposite of escape; it's a way to connect with reality after a day of making up, and a way to connect with someone else's imagination after a day that is all too real." – Nora Efron
"Reading makes us all immigrants. It takes us away from home, but more importantly, it finds us homes everywhere." – Jean Rhys
"Liberation is definitely one of the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences of my life. Stories gave me a place to lose myself. They made me remember. forget. They made me imagine different endings and better possible worlds." – Roxane Gay
"You think that pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read it. It was the books that taught me that the things that hurt me the most were the very things that united me with all the people alive who have ever lived." – James Baldwin
"I can feel infinitely alive reading a book curled up on the couch." - Benedict Cumberbatch
"Some books set us free, some books set us free." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Writing and reading reduce our sense of loneliness. It deepens, broadens and expands our sense of life: It nourishes the soul. When writers nod and even make us laugh at the accuracy of their prose and truth, or life, our buoyancy returns. Instead of being overwhelmed by life's absurdity over and over again It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm. You can't stop a raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and souls of the people who were together on that ship." – Anne Lamott
"We tell ourselves stories to live." – Joan Didion
"Books and doors are the same thing. You open them and you pass into another world." – Jeanette Winterson
"Something good takes me out of myself and then refills me, now it's too big and uncomfortable with harmony." – David Sedaris
"Books, let's face it, are better than anything else. If we played in the Cultural Fantasy Boxing League and put the books in a fifteen-round battle against the best any other art has to offer, then the books would win almost every time." ." – Nick Hornby
We read to know that we are not alone. - C.S. Lewis
"When you read a book word for word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in its creation, its coming into being, its existence, its being. And as you read and re-read it, the book is of course yours, your thoughts. and contributes to the creation of your emotions, the greatness of your soul, and your temperament." – Ursula K. Le Guin
"It's really hard to be alone for too long in the world of words. Even though you don't have a friend somewhere, you still have your tongue, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you, and in an instant there will be a story to live in." – Naomi Shihab Nye
"Read a lot. Expect something grand, uplifting, or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading but rereading." – Susan Sontag
"Have you ever had the books? If your answer to that question is not 'yes', I'm not sure how to talk to you." - Haruki Murakami
"A story can always be torn apart as it sits inside a book on the shelf, and it cuts or strokes us open to a new truth, even after we've read it dozens or even twenty times." – André Dubus
"When you learn to read, you will be free forever." -Frederick Douglass
"Literature is the safe and traditional means by which we learn about the world and pass on values from one generation to the next. Books save lives." – Laurie Anderson
"Reading fiction is important. It's a vital way to imagine a life different from our own, which makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex storylines takes our brains beyond the 140-character short-thinking and expands our brains by staying in it. The world of a novel. It gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar ice caps." – Ann Patchett
"Both reading and writing are life-long experiences, in the process of which we, encountering words used in certain ways, by them persuade our minds and hearts to bring the presence, power, and power of imagination." – Eudora Welty
