As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a long time, but she has not been wai… - Maureen Corrigan

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies.

Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls.