"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"I have never been able to resist a book about books."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"I wanted to live among books."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. "
— Tara Bray Smith

"That's what this country needs -- more books!"
— Christopher Morley

"Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned--in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?"
— Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)

"Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons."
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)

"One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries. "
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Literature simply becomes richer after you've been fired, rejected, stranded, or had to change a few midnight diapers."
— Christian Bauman

"The function of a book is to provide a reading experience."
— Douglas Rushkoff