James Baldwin: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”

Dani Shapiro: “Books saved my life. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awanress, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s. Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. They connected me deeply to my own humanity.”

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie: “Books let us know we’re not the center of the universe; the universe has many centers.”

Perhaps the greatest gift a book can bring is empathy: the gift that broadens our horizons, that lets us know that we are not alone.

It is a most extraordinary gift.