In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.
There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas.
Reading can be dangerous.
Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?
I shall start at the beginning. Though of coarse, the beginning is never where you think it is.
And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline.
But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.
People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.
Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head.
For it must be very lonely being dead.
What better place to kill time than a library?
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.
People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.
Tragedy alters everything.
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.
Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.
Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.
Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.
What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney?
I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.
opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
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