“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, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)

Carl Sagan has written and said quite a few amazing things. But this quote in particular is perhaps my absolute favorite. Maria of Strange Lucidity brought it up in her video about “Everything interesting I learned in my second year as a literature student.” She always manages to come up with so many amazing quotables and leads me down so many avenues of thought I might not have taken on my own. This one quote, though, from Cosmos, truly speaks to the power of books and why they are so necessary to keep around.

I’m not sure that I can really add much to what Sagan already said here. Books are magic. They are perhaps among the most powerful manmade objects of all time. I don’t think anyone will ever top how sublime this passage is in explaining just why books are so awesome, dangerous, and wondrous.