Books multiply your lifespan

Who said: a reader lives 1000 times before he dies

Books Multiply Your Lifespan?

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"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

Those words, often attributed to George R.R. Martin through his character Jojen Reed in A Dance with Dragons, have outlived the pages they were printed on. And rightly so—they resonate like a bell in an empty hall.

Reading ≠ Escape
Reading = Expansion

Let’s unravel it.

Each story is a vessel. When you read, you don’t vanish from your world—you expand into others. You're not merely sitting on a couch; you're riding a dragon, walking beside emperors, decoding alien languages, or unlocking the mind of a 12th-century monk.

And the colours of these journeys? Subtle, layered, sometimes dim like candlelight flickering on parchment, other times sharp as lightning over a battlefield. Stories don’t just show you life—they lend you lives.

Here’s a thought:
If your body is bound to a single lifetime, but your mind can roam across epochs and galaxies—what are you waiting for?

A few lives you might borrow:

• A spy in Cold War Berlin, waiting under a sodium-lit bridge.
• A botanist on Mars, counting potatoes.
• A mother in Lagos, navigating silence and thunder.
• A time-worn detective in 1930s Tokyo, watching cigarette smoke curl.
• A child in a future without books, digging for words.

One reader once muttered, squinting under the glow of her e-reader: “I’ve never been anywhere, but I’ve seen everything.”
She wasn’t wrong.

And now, a confession.
There was a time I believed reading was passive. A leisure. A pastime. How wrong I was.
Reading is resistance. Reading is the quietest rebellion. It’s the act of absorbing centuries into the folds of a Tuesday afternoon.

Boom—pages turned. A gun fired. A heart broken. A kingdom lost.
Silence again.

You laugh at a footnote, your tea goes cold, the world beyond the window continues unaware. But you? You just lived, died, lived again.

As one character once said—"You know nothing"—until you've read.

So the next time someone scoffs, “Why read fiction?”,
Ask them this:
Why live only once?

But here’s the twist.
What if the quote isn’t really from Martin?
What if it’s older, deeper, borrowed from a forgotten soul in a forgotten story?

Now that’s a mystery we’ll explore… next time.