We hear words like these almost every day, and in many places of the world. But if you take a book into your hands, you immediately feel a change. It seems that books have this wonderful quality—they help us slow down. As soon as you open a book, you no longer fear that things will whizz by at a maddening speed. All of a sudden, you come to believe you don’t have to dash off to do some urgent work of little importance. In books, things happen quietly and in a precisely arranged order. Maybe because their pages are numbered, maybe because the pages rustle gently and soothingly as you leaf through them. In books, events of the past calmly meet events that are yet to come. The universe of a book happily fuses reality with imagination and fantasy. And sometimes you wonder if it was in a book or in life that you noticed how beautifully the drops of thawing snow drip from the roof, or how pleasing to the eye is the neighbour’s wall overgrown with moss. Was it in a book or in reality that you were lying in the summer grass, or sitting with your legs crossed, watching clouds sail across the sky? I am sure that books are never bored when they are in your hands. Someone who enjoys reading—be it a child or adult—leads a much more interesting life than someone who doesn’t care for books, who is always racing against the clock, who never has time to sit down, who fails to notice much of what surrounds them.
“I’m in a hurry!” .. “I don’t have time!” ..