“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.”

“All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.”

“All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you forget them, one after another.”

“It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you're readin' done,
An' turn another—likely not so good;
But what you're after is to turn 'em all.”

“Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.”

“After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.”

“All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.”

“Why are you ashamed of yourself?
What happens after that?
But I really like your way of walking
In which you head straight and always hit a wall.”

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

“(…) Work on, and the universe will work with you. After all the very idea of doing the right thing comes to you from the unknown. Leave it to the unknown as far as the results go, just go through the necessary movements. You are merely one of the links in the long chain of causation. Fundamentally, all happens in the mind only. When you work for something whole-heartedly and steadily, it happens, for it is the function of the mind to make things happen. (…).”