To Fly

To read is to fly:
it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view
over  wide terrains of history,
human variety, ideas, shared experience and the
fruits of many inquiries.
- A. C. Grayling

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road.
They are the destination, and the journey.
They are home.
- Anna Quindlen

Germany

India 

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,
learned something, become a better person.
Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on…
Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
- Nora Ephron

India

Everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books.  
Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time,
transported to  another world.

Thailand

India

Reading a good book is a universal activity, and people read while they do
just about everything else, and that includes reading while playing the
piano, which my sister used to do.

Sri Lanka

At one magical instant in your early childhood,
the page of a book–that string of confused, alien ciphers–shivered into meaning.
Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened.
You became, irrevocably, a reader.
- Alberto Manguel

Burma

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly,
into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates

Lourdes, France

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends;
they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the
most patient of teachers. 
- Charles William Eliot

Italy

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
- James Russell Lowell

India

We read to know we are not alone. 
- C.S. Lewis

Tibet

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
- Jorge Luis Borges

China

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still,
retreat or fly into the future.
- Jim Bishop

Thailand

That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book,
and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will
lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive
- all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.
― Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

India

Kashmir

Korea

We live for books.
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose 

Canada

Turkey

Afghanistan

To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
- Victor Hugo

Italy 

Yemen

I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the
most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
- Wisława Szymborska
1996 Nobel Prize in Literature

India

Cuba

Japan

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
- Rene Descartes