Julie

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“It’s a very funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“The world was hers for the reading.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn