Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape....For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place.
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it.
Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.
But when you read books you almost feel like you're out there in the world. Like you're going on this adventure right with the main character. At least, that's the way I do it. It's actually not that bad. Even if it is mad nerdy.
It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you've ever known before.
As a child, I loved to read books. The library was a window to the world, a pathway to worlds and people far from my neighborhood in Philadelphia.
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
For me, the cool thing is doing things that could only be done in gaming.
Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
You learn a lot as a kid, like you don't know anything. I didn't know what was gonna happen if I opened the door. I thought I was gonna be in another world somehow.
I have to admit that talking authoritatively about my students' stories can make me feel, at times, like an astronaut who has just landed on a new planet and insists on giving guided tours to its inhabitants.
Adventurous reading allows one to escape a little from the provincialities of one's home culture and the blinders of one's narrow self.
Whenever other worlds invite us, whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition, that’s where life starts, that’s where you start feeling yourself living.
The Unicorn Sonata... tells us that our true home is often right around the corner, if we'd only open our eyes - and our ears - to find it.
My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.
Reading is like travel, allowing you to exit your own life for a bit, and to come back with a renewed, even inspired, perspective.
