“Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.”

— Carl Sagan

42 min 33 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: 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.

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Do you have more details about the quote "Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you." by Carl Sagan?

Carl Sagan 365

American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 126

“The whole idea of what happens when you read a book, I find absolutely stunning. Here's some product of a tree, little black squiggles on it, you open it up, an inside your head is the voice of someone speaking, who may have been dead 3000 years, and there he is talking directly to you, what a magical thing that is.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Carl Sagan on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (full interview, May 20th, 1977)
Others

“That's what the voices in your head are for, to get you through the silent parts.”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“What a strange world you must live in, inside your head.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Aftermaths (p. 252)
Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)

“You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)
Context: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.