For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven we inhabit when we read a good book. - Christopher Morley

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.

You know at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you.