"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones."
-Henry David Thoreau p.3
...there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me; the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre. p.3
"There is no Frigate like a Book-
To take us Lands away
Nor any coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry"
-Emily Dickinson p.4
"When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me."
-Montaigne p.5
I felt that I... existed in a different dimension from everyone else. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island. p.6
"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere."
-Hazel Rochman p.7
