Books did not need to be beautiful back in the Fifties, because nothing else was beautiful back then. Books were simply there: you read them because they were diverting or illuminating or in some way useful but not because the books themselves were aesthetically appealing.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mysteics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness.

Purists maintain that if you go to a baseball game you will almost always see something you have never seen before. Unfortunately, it usually takes place in the stands.

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

As was the case in Requiem for a Dream, Pollock, A Beautiful Mind, House of Sand and Fog, The Hulk and Dark Water, Connelly's mere presence in a film guarantees that things will turn out badly for the male lead, as Connelly is always cast as the Angel of Death. Fun to hang out with, great eyes, amazing eyebrows, but the Angel of Death.

Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later I haven't quite finished Villette.