“Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.”
“Most people latch on to the character they’re most like, and that’s their guide through the world of the novel. My ideal is a reader who can find his or herself in lots of different characters.”
“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
“Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.”
when i’m mad at the world around me, i read. call it escapism or whatever, but it works. that satisfying feeling of flipping a page, finishing a chapter, finally knowing what happens next? that’s my high. do people understand that? of course… just most of them are on the internet.
