This is why I studied literature in college. This is why I became a teacher: to share in grand conversations about books, to spread the joy, to initiate and welcome students into the fraternity, into..."the club of clubs," to travel with them into wondrously familiar or incredibly strange imaginative worlds.

She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.

A good book is an event in my life.

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.