Rapture and Priorities

"A room without books is like a body without a soul." - Cicero

"Sit in a room and read - and read and read. 

And read the right books by the right people. 

Your mind is brought onto that level, 

and you have a nice, mild, 

slow-burning rapture all the time." 

      - Joseph Campbell from The Power of Myth

In these pictures are some of the books in my house, which has twice as many books as it does square footage.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. . .The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe."
 - Thomas Jefferson

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read." - Mark Twain

    "I think we ought to read 
      only the kind of books 
      that wound and stab us."
           - Franz Kafka

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, 

we would find in each man's life sorrow and suffering 

enough to disarm all hostilities." - Longfellow

Kitchen books - books in every room of the house.

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me
~ Leonard Cohen

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” 

- Thomas Jefferson

How-to Books

Art Books

"Proverbs often contradict one another, as any reader soon discovers. 

The sagacity that advises us to look before we leap promptly warns us that if we hesitate we are lost; 

that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but out of sight, out of mind."  

                                                                   - Leo Rosten

                         What are YOU Reading?
 “Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” - Voltaire



 “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”  Ray Bradbury



"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Cicero