"The man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world... The moment he takes up a book, he immediately enters a different world."
Info & reflection: "Imprisoned" is the strong word: not reading isn't neutral, it's a kind of confinement, in your own present, your own small neighbourhood of experience, your own repetitions. The book doesn't add information to a world that's already complete, it literally opens a way out of a cell you didn't see as one.
Related in anthology
- We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics, and only few will know our content. — If reading opens worlds, people are books few read to the end.
- There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you. — A book opens worlds only at its right time.