Books afford the surest relief in the most melancholy moments.
I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.
There is hardly any grief that an hour's reading will not dissipate.
I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.
Since the choice of what we curl up with is often crucial for our solace and sanity, we need to learn how to nurture the talent of selection. Book browsing is a meditative art...Books are as essential as breathing.
The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
Writing, at its best and truest, can offer solace and salvation for both readers and writers.
I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.
Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
...at it's best fiction is medicine.
Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds.
Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage
Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.
When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure.
This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
In a time of crisis, there is rational tendency to turn to the writer.
[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
I'm a big believer in bibliotherapy.
If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.
