So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.
We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books.
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed — or worse, expelled.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable.