A wonderful quotation about what reading can do for and to us. Not a question of clocking up facts or notches on a cultural scorecard, but some deeper effect on who we are and how we respond to the world.

‘What does it matter how cultivated and up to date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read?  What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.’

Source: So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid, trans by Natasha Wimmer, London: Sort of Books, 2004, p 24

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