The pleasure of reading, Virginia Woolf wrote, is "so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it." In fact, she argued, the reason "we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick--the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this--we have loved reading."

Michiko Kakutani