This week’s theme for Top Ten Tuesday is reasons we are thankful for books. I am guessing I have written a few such posts already, about why reading and books are important to me. Anyways, I took another attempt to write a thankful for books post. A little differently this time..

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Why Thankful for Books?

Most Wonderful Gifts

“A book is a gift you can open again and again.” – Garrison Kellor

“I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.” – Emma Thompson

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney

Books are Magic

“Books may well be the only true magic.”— Alice Hoffman

“A book is a dream you hold in your hands.” ~Neil Gaiman

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” – Stephen King

“I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.” Madeleine L’Engle

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Happiness. That’s what books smells like. Happiness. That’s why I always wanted to have a book shop. What better life than to trade in happiness?” – Sarah MacLean 

“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.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

They are Experiences

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“A good book is an event in my life.”— Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” — Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”―Mary McLeod Bethune

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” – Annie Dillard

“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.” – Charles Baudelaire

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”— William Styron

A Place to Find Friends

“I don’t read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.” – Elbert Hubbard

“Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.” – George Saunders

“It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don’t have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables around you and suddenly there will be a story to live in.” – Naomi Shihab Nye, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven

“Reading brings us unknown friends”— Honoré de Balzac

“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”— Rainer Maria Rilke

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something–a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things–which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” – Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”— Charles W. Eliot

Books are Familiarity

“Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” – Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” – Jean Rhys

“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.” ―Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary

“Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.”— John Green

And Let You Travel Time and Space

“Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.”― Mary Schmich

“I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go…” – Sharon Creech

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”— Jeanette Winterson

“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” – Anna Quindlen

“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” ~Mason Cooley

Help You Understand Yourself and Others

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin

“I am a part of everything that I have read.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”―Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”— Ursula K. LeGuin

“I’ve always thought that a good book should be either the entry point inward, to learn about yourself, or a door outward, to open you up to new worlds.” ― Taylor Jenkins Reid

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood 

They are Contradictions

“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.” – Nora Ephron

“Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.” – Roxane Gay 

“And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity. Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself.” — Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Dangerous and Powerful and Healing and…

“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labelled ‘This could change your life.'” – Helen Exley

“A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” ― Mortimer J. Adler

“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature.” — Lisa Kleypas, A Wallflower Christmas

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” – Louisa May Alcott

“One must always be careful of books and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.” Cassandra Clare

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller

Do You Need More Reasons Still?

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham, Books And You

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” ― Joseph Addison

“Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.” Plato

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.

Thankful for Books of Thanks!

This is my second list of thankful books.. goes both towards Top Ten Tuesday for this week – for I am always thankful for books of thanks too (so yes I have two lists for TTT) and Thursday 13 (in advance).

For the younger readers

• Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson and art by Matt Faulkner (5 years and up). A must-read biography of an inspiring lady – Sarah Hale – who I had no idea about until this book.
• Five Little Thank-Yous by Cindy Jin and illustrated by Dawn M. Cardona (Baby – 5 years). Short, sweet, and great to show the simple things to be thankful for.
• Thank You For Being My Friend by Peter Bently and art by Gill McLean (7 years and up). A sweet story of friendship geared towards children with fears of the dark.
• Thank You, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish with illustrations by Barbara Siebel Thomas (4 – 8 years, and up). Amelia Bedelia does it again – make me smile and laugh, and want to take words literally (simply because)! So thank you, Amelia Bedelia!!
• Thank You, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco (6 – 9 years, and up). An inspiring and heartwarming true-life story of resilience, kindness, and the transformative power of a dedicated teacher.
• The Thank You Letter by Jane Cabrera (4 – 8 years, and up). This book beautifully (in cute artwork and a tender narrative) shows the power of a simple thank you note!
• Bear Says Thanks by Karma Wilson and illustrated by Jane Chapman (2 – 5 years, and up). Sweet rhyming verse and beautiful artwork come together to show readers the magic of friends and gratitude.
• The Thank You Book by Mo Willems (3 – 6 years). What if you forget someone important while saying your thank yous? Another adorable read from Mo Willems.
• Thank You and Good Night by Patrick McDonnell (2 – 5 years). A sweet sweet read for young ones that shows simply how to be thankful for each day
• Thank You, M’am by Langston Hughes. A great short story by Hughes (10 years and up), and my first non-poetic read by him. Now I am going to read more in this collection (which includes this listed story too).

And the Rest

• Thank You for Being You by Bradley Trevor Greive (a book for all ages). This one makes a great anytime gift for all your loved ones. You will know why as soon as you get one for yourself! Unique, universal, and so you (whoever you are, and whomever you need to thank!)
• Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey by A. J. Jacobs (Happiness). Such a unique book; one that shows that we never know where a path might lead to.
• I Want to Thank You by Gina Hamadey (Happiness). Delightful, joyous, and inspiring memoir (also self-help read of sorts)

Related Reads

• Thankful For Wonderful Children’s Thank You Books
• Sunday Scribblings #166: Write a Beautiful Thank You Poem
• Find Inspiration this World Letter Writing Day: In Wondrous Books and More

And Now, the End of This Post

Dear reader, have you read any of these books mentioned? What makes you thankful for books? Or for our wonderful world? Which of these quotes appeals to you the most?