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

Probably not, because you’re just crying, for God’s sake, and you cry all the time what with all the current apocalypses, especially if you’re not doing so well at work, or you spent too much time reading comments online, or people are moving on with their lives around you, or families are making their normal, irremediable family trouble.

Breakdown was what happened when their gorgeous shells became so brittle and delicate they could be shattered with the slightest tap of the back of a spoon—tenderly set and ready to ooze out of their gelid whites with a hot, vividly compelling, golden violence.

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,

“To read oneself into another person's tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one's existence."

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.

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

This happens a lot, that feeling when I can’t remember if I thought a thought or if a book planted it in my brain, and it’s just now popped up from wherever it was hiding. Part of my fate as a greedy, acquisitive reader is that I can never escape the overbearing presence of books, whether in the mind or on the shelf. I wonder if, without them, I’d

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