It was like this passage opened an unnoticed door into a new chamber of my heart, or my brain, or a shortcut between the two. I didn't know if it had just appeared, or if it had always been there, a primordial part of my being. Suddenly it was clear to me that books did not work on everyone the way they worked on me, on Roland, on A. S. Byatt. I kn

I liked how the books and their world existed so wholly without me. I liked being able to be in it without having to hide from its gaze. I was not accustomed to sitting comfortably in rooms full of people, and there was something so new and pleasant about being a secret but welcome observer in the busy world of the book.

To live like this in books i

I didn't go to books to be a heroine. I went to books because I wanted to be—nothing, nobody. I wanted nothing so much as to be a kind of sociable air, circulating invisibly in the room, necessary but never noticed,

I thought about my old feeling of too-muchness, and what it would mean to surrender to that "softness and permeability" that Ehrenreich describes. To be permeable to the tides of story and history, to let everything that feels like too much flow freely through the mind and body. This is the way to live joyfully and defiantly, whether in p

After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it, tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.

How to feel nothing, which I mistook for the ideal state of being. How to feel like nothing, which, at the time, I believed was the only reasonable position.

I thought this was wisdom. Now, I see it was self-defense. Worse, it was a self-defense tactic that I'd unconsciously employed many times in the past, in the lulls between depressive episodes.

For most of my life, I believed that this atomized, powerfully powerless tranquility was the ideal state.

As a reader, I am always diffusing into the world of fiction. As a writer, I cannot solidify into direct statements. As a person, I cannot solidify into someone who makes anything happen. In my most lost moments, I see myself disintegrating and drifting into everything and everyone else, floating unseen and dispersed through the world the way I wan

Altogether, denarrative desire is basically the idea that sometimes, when you reach the end of a book, all you want to do is turn back to the first page and read it over again—but differently.