"A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us."

• Franz Kafka

"Books...are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development." - Dorothy L. Sayers

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." -Dorothy Parker

The following are bookmarks available in O; the Oprah Magazine this month (April, 2003):

"Read not to contradict and confute...nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider." - Sir Francis Bacon

"Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you." - Harold Bloom

"A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return." - Salman Rushdie

"It seems, somehow, that she has left her own world and entered the realm of the book." - Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours.

The truth of a story is what the novelist strives for, and quite often the writer is taken down strange and unexpected paths on this search. Madeleine LEngle Choose your friends like your books, few but choice. -- American Proverb

There's no thief like a bad book. -- Italian Proverb Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. -- Francis Bacon

And since nobody else is saying it to you, I'll do: thank you for sharing! I enjoyed them the first time I read, but I thought I could leave to others to put a little comment...

Thank you for the kind words. Here's one for the road, not related to books or reading, but on writing code, of all things...but applicable to all writing, I think. Who among us has not found this beast rising before us? "Writing code, he (Stuart Feldman) explains, is like writing poetry: every word, each placement counts. Except that software is harder, because digital poems can have millions of lines which are all somehow interconnected. Try fixing programming errors, known as bugs, and you often introduce new ones. So far, he laments, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the beast of complexity." -Survey: The Beast of Complexity; The Economist (London, UK); Apr 14, 2001. From A.Word.A.Day--silver bullet for Tue, 27 May 2003