books

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned the last page of the book and closed the cover, Norah's connection to the writer felt absolute. It was a breathless, consuming rapture....

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.

Sometimes surviving is all you can do

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

When the imagination takes over, the second hand could be the hour hand to a creator of stories.

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul--I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout__ novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn__ like it, and he says to her, __ already know about human beings.

Paradoxically, however, a story ceases to be like life on its last page. Life goes on, but the story does not. Its characters have no vitality outside the first page and after the last is only good as the next reader's.

The only thing better than a well-read book is a well-read book only read by yourself.

Perhaps we would all like to love more richly than we do. Many novels are about love- most are, perhaps-and it gives us pleasure to identify with loving characters. They are free, and we are not. But we may not want to admit this; for to do so might make us feel, consciously, that our on loves are inadequate.

Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a bean bag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else's victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they are not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings the book closes and I'm plunged back into reality.

If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs

Because zombies can__ go out into the sun, most of them tend to be afraid of anything that can go into the sun and live to tell the tale.

Be determined. Be persistent. Be consistent," the muse said. "Then he looked at me and winked. "Never give up, dumb-ass.