books

I want to get lost in other worlds and let my imagination travel beyond this life I know.

This is the Self-Esteem Looking-Glass. You have to look in the mirror and compliment yourself.

Good stories take your imagination to anywhere

We're all entitled to our different likes and dislikes. Imagine the world if we all liked the same things.

Yeah, right. Instead of watching TV, we'll practice our weird magical powers. Great. What's next? Zooming around on flying carpets?

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

Reading books would be boring if you lack imagination...

Books allow one to jump into another person's imagination while also exploring their own!

It is because of this sea between us. The earth has never, up to now, separated us. But, ever since yesterday, there has been something in this nonetheless real, perfectly Atlantic, salty, slightly rough sea that has cast a spell on me. And every time I think about Promethea, I see her crossing this great expanse by boat and soon, alas, a storm comes up, my memory clouds over, in a flash there are shipwrecks, I cannot even cry out, my mouth is full of saltwater sobs. I am flooded with vague, deceptive recollections, I am drowning in my imagination in tears borrowed from the most familiar tragedies, I wish I had never read certain books whose poison is working in me. Has this Friday, perhaps, thrown a spell on me? But spells only work if you catch them. I have caught the Tragic illness. If only Promethea would make me some tea I know I would find some relief. But that is exactly what is impossible. And so, today, I am sinning. I am sinking beneath reality. I am weighted down with literature. That is my fate. Yet I had the presence of mind to start this parenthesis, the only healthy moment in these damp, feverish hours. All this to try to come back to the surface of our book... Phone me quickly, Promethea, get me out of this parenthesis fast!)

Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for the pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move. A poplar. A man with plumes. A swimming figure. And he would not be so lucky, he thinks, to speak to the young sapper again. He stays awake in any case this night, to see if the figure moves towards him. Ignoring the tablet that brings painlessness, he will remain awake till the light dies out and the smell of candle smoke drifts into his room and into the girl's room farther down the hall. If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this. His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room. [298]

Every time you think of escaping mentally or physically, grab the book that lies inches away from your heart.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.

I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life, and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.

Write it down and it will come alive.

The sound of her phone shocked her out of the dark world that was currently playing in front of her eyes from the book in her lap. She wondered sometimes, why she bothered with books. If she wanted to hallucinate, all she had to do was get up in the morning.

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast__ mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people__erhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven__ut still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.

A book is a magical thing that lets you travel to far-away places without ever leaving your chair.