R IS FOR READING

     I know there are only nine letters left in the A to Z Challenge, but I'm tired, tired, tired.  This should be the easiest post of all, because really... reading.  What's not to love?  But my brain has shut down tonight and I know I can't do justice to books on my own.  So instead, I'll provide some quotations from writers much wiser and more eloquent than I am.  Enjoy.

The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will last you until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.  - Anthony Trollope

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. —Frederick Douglass

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations—something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own. —Katherine Paterson

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. —E.P. Whipple

A room without books is like a body without a soul. ― Cicero

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. ― James Baldwin

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.  - J.R.R. Tolkien

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -Groucho Marx