Imran

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Books fall open, you fall in.”
― David T.W. McCord

“If dreams are thwarted, then yearning must take their place
If reunion is impossible, then longing must take its place.”
― Faiz Ahmed Faiz

“Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.”
― Leonard Woolf