“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

—  Carl Sagan

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

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"On Delany the Magician", a foreword to Trouble on Triton (1996) by Samuel R. Delany, and reprinted in Acker's collection Bodies of Work (1996)
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Context: Every book, remember, is dead until a reader activates it by reading. Every time that you read you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies. Aeneas did. Odysseus did. Listen to Delany, a prophet.

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“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 282
Context: Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

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“I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

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Variant: I find TV very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.

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“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)
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“F. Shaw: As prolific as you are, how long did it take you to research and write this book?
A. Axelrod: Well over a year. I do my research for one book while I write another—that way I get to read as well as write.”

Alan Axelrod (1952) American historian

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