The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

There is nothing quite so alive as a book that has been well loved.

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. It only makes sense that some of what we feel when we’re reading would . . . rub off.”

gifts are meant to be used. Otherwise, why have ’em? If I were you, I’d figure out how to get better at it, practice at it, so you know how it works.

Like humans, books experienced their share of heartache—and like humans, they remembered.

Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present—and, if properly cared for, a future.

Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.

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.

all truly good writing—fiction or nonfiction—has a heartbeat, a life force that comes from the writer, like an invisible cord connecting them to the reader. Without it, the work is dead on arrival.”

Books may be likened to the people who come into our lives. Some will become precious to us; others will be set aside. The key is to discern which is which.

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.

She understood the need to retreat behind a book, to create a physical barrier between you and the world. She’d been doing it for years, seeking refuge in other people’s stories.

We develop a particular fondness for our favorite books, the way they feel and smell and sound, the memories they invoke, until they begin to exist for us as living, breathing things.

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.

Reading brings us unknown friends. —Honoré de Balzac

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