“Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.”

“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.”

“Ki is a very complex word… and even more difficult to translate to westerners.”

“The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world… the picture… which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him.”

“Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page.”

“For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead… We're nothing more than dust jackets for books… so many pages to a person…”

“Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.”

“Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.”

“A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.”

“The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.”