"This is how the world works: first we tell ourselves a story, then we dream our way inside it as a way of bringing it to life." (xxvii)
"The reason books and reading remain essential is because they are still the most effective mechanisms by which to crack open the universe." (xxviii)
"what is the purpose of news if not to inform us and, in so doing, stir us out of our complacency? The same, I want to say, applies to the whole art of writing, which involves asking questions that cannot be answered, embracing complexity." (xxviii)
"The truest act of resistance is to respond with hope." (xxxiii)
"We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of the their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves." (16)
"she relied on books to pull back from the onslaught, to distance herself from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who are." (34) [This resonates!]
"We come to books (or, at least, I do) to see beneath the cover story, to be challenged and confounded, made to question our assumptions, even as the writers we read are compelled to question their own." (44)
"reading, in which we are given a template that we must remake as our own . . . a way for us to understand ourselves." (47)
"As readers . . . the participation required leads to an inevitable empathy (67) . . . it is to be brought in touch with our commonality as human beings." (68)
Dylan Thomas: "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." (71)
Nicholas Carr: "Deep reading, says the study's lead researcher, Nicole Speer, 'is by no means a passive exercise.' The reader becomes the book." (100)
"Every library worth the name contains dozens, if not hundred, of books that fit these criteria [books we have read, we haven't, and those we are currently reading, and those we will never read], that speak to where we wish to go as much as where we've been." (127)
Nicholas Carr: "Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind." (133)
"here again is what reading has to offer: the blurring of the boundaries that divide us, that keep us separate and apart (147) . . . It connects us at the deepest levels (149)
"I compartmentalized, protecting both my time to be distracted and my time to concentrate." (152)
