How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transc… - Anna Quindlen

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming.

People go through life thinking they are making decisions, when they're really just making plans, which is not the same thing at all. And along the way, they get a little damaged, lots of tiny cracks, holding together but damaged still.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

Four A.M. and the darkness had a quality of inexorability and menace as though it would never lift, as though, without anyone noticing it, the dawn of the day before had been the beginning of the last light ever in the history of the world.