Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.

When we read we are able to travel to many places, meet many people and understand the world.

The most powerful person in the world is the story teller.The storyteller sets the vision, values and agendaof an entire generation that is to come.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

I read 'The High Frontier' in high school. I read it multiple times, and I was already primed. As soon as I read it, it made sense to me. It seemed very clear that planetary surfaces were not the right place for an expanding civilization inside our solar system.