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If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

—J.K. Rowling

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One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

—Carl Sagan

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A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

—Charles Baudelaire

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When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.

—Maya Angelou

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Books are like people, they turn up in your life when you most need them.

—Emma Thompson

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It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

—John Waters

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Books are a uniquely portable magic.

—Stephen King

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Think before you speak.
Read before you think.

—Fran Lebowitz

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A word after a word after a word is power.

—Margaret Atwood

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Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.

—Lena Dunham

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Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

—Jeanette Winterson

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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

—Ursula K. Le Guin

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We read to know we are not alone.

—C.S. Lewis

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It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don't have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.

—Naomi Shihab Nye

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Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

—Susan Sontag
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Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you.

—Haruki Murakami

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A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.

—Andre Dubus

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Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

—Frederick Douglass

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Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

—Ann Patchett

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A room without books is like a body without a soul.

—Cicero

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I love the way that each book—any book—is its own journey. You open it, and off you go.

—Sharon Creech

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Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.

—Malorie Blackman

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Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.

—George Saunders

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Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.

—Nora Ephron

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Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

—Jean Rhys

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You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.

—James Baldwin

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That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

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We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: We need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

—Philip Pullman

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Books may well be the only true magic.

—Alice Hoffman

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Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.

—Alberto Manguel

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Reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

—Catherynne M. Valente

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If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

—François Mauriac

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To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

—W. Somerset Maugham

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I don't read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.

—Elbert Hubbard

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Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

—Louisa May Alcott

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Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

—Joyce Carol Oates

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A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.

—Madeleine L'Engle

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Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells... and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like pressed flower... both strange and familiar.

—Cornelia Funke

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The best books are those that tell you what you know already.

—George Orwell

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Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one's own self.

—Franz Kafka

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Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled 'This could change your life.’

—Helen Exley

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Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

—John Green

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The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

—Alan Bennett

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The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters.

—Celeste Ng

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A book is a gift you can open again and again.

—Garrison Kellor

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Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

—Charles W. Eliot

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That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive—all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

—Mary Ann Shaffer

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Books save lives.

—Laurie Anderson

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Poem: Books, by Erica Jong

Poem: Books, by Billy Collins

Poetry Everywhere

Haiku Mind

Wreck this journal

Burn after writing

The Writer’s Block

The 3 A.M. epiphany

Writing Down the Bones

Good Poems

Good Poems for Hard Times

Winter Morning Walks

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Your Body Knows the Answer

Offering from the Conscious Body

The Sense of Wonder

O’Keeffe: Days in a life

Garfield Minus Garfield

Hyperbole and a Half

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Songwriters on Songwriting

Musicophilia

Touched With Fire

The Depression Book

There is Nothing Wrong With You

Nothing Happens Next

No Bad Parts

Zombie Survival Guide

Price of the Ticket

Some of the Dharma

A Natural History of the Senses

Kindest Regards

Aimless Love

Against Forgetting

Nine Gates

How to Train a Wild Elephant

Comfortable With Uncertainty

Einstein’s Dreams

The Sun and Her Flowers

Inconsequential dilemmas

The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

You Are Not So Smart

Choose Your Own Adventure: Hyperspace

Could Be Worse!

1619 Project

The New Jim Crow

Caste

My Grandmother’s Hands

White Fragility

White Like Me

The Jealousy Workbook

Flash Fiction

World’s Shortest Stories of Love & Death

Attachment in Psychotherapy

Thoughts and Feelings

Heavier Than Heaven

Me Talk Pretty One Day

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

A Problem from Hell

How Fascism Works

1984

The Sixth Extinction

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How reading makes us more human

An ode to being read to

The read-aloud handbook

The gift of rereading

Why some people become lifelong readers

How to show kids the joy of reading

What rereading childhood books teaches adults about themselves

What happens when AI has read everything?

We’re all invited To The Lighthouse

On reading

On poetry

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What are you reading these days? Why? What draws you to it?
What are your favorite all-time books, poems, lyrics, articles?
What happens inside when you read—and reread—them?
What aren’t you reading that you wish you were? Why aren’t you? What gets in the way?

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