Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.
Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.
I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?
Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)
And when I look at a history book and think of the imaginative effort it has taken to squeeze this oozing world between two boards and typeset, I am astonished. Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!
I live alone, with cats, books, pictures, fresh vegetables to cook, the garden, the hens to feed.
I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.
the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.
I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that.
Knowing that books are something that is hidden, that almost has that alchemical quality to it. There is a secret society in here, and if you belong to it, you'll be able to transform your lead into gold. I have that rather magical sense about books - that they do, somehow, have special powers.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.
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