“I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

“But, I'm sure you weren't aware of the dream that was born in me when I was small… Well, let me rephrase that -- when I was young -- because, technically, I'm still very small. And I get this from everybody when they meet me: 'You're so tiny.' I guess I am. I don't feel any height, but, apparently, I am not that big.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

“Women are not exempt from patriarchy, they are also products of it. So, they also come in with that system of 'am I right' or 'am I wrong.'”

Zoya Akhtar (1974) Indian film director

“The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.”

William Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost

“I learn more from books than from people”

William Sleator (1945–2011) Young adult science fiction novelist

“It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

“Thus, while I am borne to loftiest heights, I behold Thee as Infinity”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

“I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle