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Representational image REUTERS/Mariana Bazo

World Book Day is observed annually April 23 "to celebrate literature and reading." The day was officially designated by the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1995 in order to give “an opportunity to recognize the power of books to change our lives for the better and to support books and those who produce them."

According to UNESCO's official website, the 24th edition, being observed Tuesday, will focus “particularly on the importance of enhancing and protecting Indigenous languages.”

Here are 15 quotes to celebrate the joy of reading taken from Good Reads and Your Story.

  • "There is no friend as loyal as a book." — Ernest Hemingway
  • "Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well." — Mark Haddon
  • "A house without books is like a room without windows." — Heinrich Mann
  • “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” — Oscar Wilde
  • “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
  • “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
  • “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” — Groucho Marx
  • "Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you.” — Barack Obama
  • “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” —John Green
  • “Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious!” — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
  • “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” — William Styron
  • “Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.” — E.P. Whipple
  • “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” — Henry Ward Beecher
  • “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” — Anna Quindlen
  • “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami
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