Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.
And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.
If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.
As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.
Tags: reading books fantasy fiction escapism neil-gaiman
When I read these books, I no longer felt like I was confined to a very tiny world. I no longer felt housebound and bedbound. Really, I told myself, I was just brainbound. And this was not such a sorry state of affairs. My brain, with a little help from other people's brains, could take me to some pretty interesting places, and create all kinds of wonderful things. Despite its faults, my brain, I decided, was not the worst place in the world to be.
Gavin ExtenceTags: science inspirational reading books brains
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Richard FlanaganTags: books
I remember hearing grandpa say that a love for god books was one of the best safeguards a man could have,' began Archie, staring thoughtfully at the fine library before him.
Louisa May AlcottTags: books archie aunt-hill eight-cousins
To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.
Pearl S. BuckTags: books quotes-about-life pearl-s-buck the-eternal-wonder rann eternal-wonder
These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.
Bram StokerTags: books horror dracula london vampire england
Parents who daily read Robert Lewis Stevenson to their children and surrounds them with blocks, plastic animals, and some cardboard boxes or kitchen pots and pans are going to produce a qualitatively different child from those who spend that time on TV or videos, even if their choices ARE only Winnie the Pooh and Mr. Rogers.
Diane MedvedThis is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.
Rebecca SolnitTags: reading books writing writers readers 54
I spend money on convenient, comfortable and luxurious things; I spend money on books too.
Amit KalantriTags: inspirational success reading books inspiration philosophy inspirational-quotes read book reading-books reading-habits philosophy-quotes
The first sign that Karma was now in cahoots with the Devil Incarnate to ruin her existance should've been before sunrise and pre-coffee.
Kelly MoranTags: books devil funny humorous contemporary-romance karma bad-day
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