Whoever reads lives a thousand lives

We are given one life, one body, one era, one country of birth. That is unfairly little for a creature able to imagine infinity. And humankind found the one loophole out of this narrowness — the book.

The only time machine that works

A book is another mind thrown wide open for you. Reading, you see the world through the eyes of a woman from another century, a soldier in a lost war, an old man on his deathbed. No technology has learned to transmit not information but the very experience of being another person. Film shows you the hero’s face; a book seats you inside his head. That is closer than even friendship allows.

Why it makes us more human

Reading has a side effect more important than pleasure: it trains what the world so badly lacks — the ability to be someone else for a while. It is hard to hate a person through whose eyes you have once looked. A people that reads — and especially one that reads in its own language — is harder to deceive, because it has already lived through more than one truth.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
— George R. R. Martin

My opinion: in a world where everything competes for your one second of attention, reading loses on speed and wins on depth. A clip entertains you from the outside; a book changes you from within. And if you have children, the dearest inheritance you can leave them is not a thing but the habit of opening a book. It is the one wealth that grows as you spend it.