For instance: everything I read when I was 17 was just a book. (Quotent Quotables)

"Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books."

-- From Valentine, by Tessa Hadley

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Until I read this line in that short story at lunch today, I never knew how to put into words my secret suspicion that there are books, and then there are the real books.

But there are. And you know the difference when you read them.