thus you discover the paradoxical virtu of reading, which is to abstract ourselves from the world in order to find meaning in it (Daniel Pennac French uthor)

From Carl Sagan:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

"Books are the mirror of the soul" Virginia Woolf

Vee, I either have the soul of a murderer or I'm a seeker of justice. Yeah, that's it.

"I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson

From the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society:

"Reading good books just ruins you for bad books."

That's from memory and may not be exactly right. Our book club read the book, and while it was sweet and entertaining, it was not exactly what I call a really good book. But the point is true.

I just saw an entry on Facebook that says, "People who say I'm hard to shop for must not know where to buy books."

"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation ; the two keep pace in their downward tendency. " - Goethe

"When I get a little money I buy book; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."

Erasmus

I just read a newspaper article on The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles where she quotes the motto of the American library in Paris

Atrum post bellum ex libris lux . . . After the darkness of war the light of books

The book details the work of the Countess de Chambrun who protected the books from the Nazis/Gestapo.

By 1920 the collection of over 1.5 million books had mainly come from those sent from the US to soldiers serving during WW1.

It has been described as "an open window on the free world"

I'm not addicted to reading. I can quit as soon as I finish one more chapter.

The Meta Picture