All About Books, Including a Quote from Carl Sagan

Surprise!!! Today’s topic is all about books, including great quotes on this topic from Carl Sagan.

Reading is a terrific pastime regardless of your specific preference. I write about magic in my novels because that’s the type of story I like to read. But I have a little secret. Books themselves are the real magic. 

A remarkable transformation happens whenever you begin a new novel. The rush of excitement, a sense of wonder, an otherworldly feeling, takes over as you read.

And for the best of stories, those sensations remain long after you’ve closed the cover on the last page. Like close friends, they become part of the fabric of your existence.

My view on this topic is somewhat biased because I’m a fan of reading. But I’m not alone in thinking life is better with a good book.

Many believe in the adage: “So many books, so little time.” Which, by the way, is a Frank Zappa quote.

Both famous and obscure individuals have discussed the heartfelt emotion provided by good books. One of the best that I’ve found is a quote by Carl Sagan, the renowned astronomer and scientist who hosted the PBS series Cosmos.

It’s a rather long quote, but one worth repeating. And for good measure, I’ll include a second quote by him that is equally insightful.

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“For 99 percent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for firsthand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the children’s game “Telephone,” over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be distorted and lost.

Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to understand the point of view of others, and not just those in power; to contemplate–with the best teachers–the insights, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history. They allow people long dead to talk inside our heads. Books can accompany us everywhere. Books are patient where we are slow to understand, allow us to go over the hard parts as many times as we wish, and are never critical of our lapses. Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos