The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”

“Books are feelings,” he replied simply. “They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what’s inside, sometimes to things we don’t even know are there.

Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own.

Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore? —Henry Ward Beecher

We read not to escape life but to learn how to live it more deeply and richly, to experience the world through the eyes of the other.

How, Belle? After everything . . . how could you do it? How??? After everything—you can ask that of me?

You shrug. “I told you, I don’t bother with politics.” “A luxury members of your class can afford, since their interests will always be protected. Meanwhile, there’s a certain faction in this country—men who call themselves patriots—who are quietly working to undermine the very values they claim to stand for. And they’re counting on people like you not bothering.

Same in 2025

They claim to be patriots, ginning up the public with talk about purity and real Americans, but what they really want is to marginalize Jews, remove them from powerful places, deny them a place in society entirely if they have their way. That’s how it started in Europe, Belle, with a bunch of patriotic Germans spouting nonsense about purity, and they want to do the same thing here. They’re organizing right now, right under your noses. The Bund. Lindbergh and his crowd. Charles Coughlin, a priest with an anti-Semitic radio show. And they’re gaining traction. The Bund held a rally in Madison Square Garden. Twenty thousand people doing the Nazi salute on American soil, and no one’s paying attention. Some are even cheering them on. The only way to keep those so-called patriots out of power is to pay attention, Belle, to decide where you stand on the issues before you accidentally find yourself on the wrong side.”

Trump

To read a book is to take a journey, to travel into a vast unknown, to hear the voices of angels both living and dead.

To lose oneself in the pages of a book is often to find oneself.

Books are rib and spine, blood and ink, the stuff of dreams dreamed and lives lived. One page, one day, one journey at a time.

In the happiest times of my life, I have reached for my books. In the saddest times of my life, my books have reached back.

The number of lives we are capable of living is limited only by the number of books we choose to read.

people’s lives were defined not by the scars they acquired but by what lay on the other side of those scars, by what’s done with the life they have left.