“My mom said I was an escapist at heart.... that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one”

“Besides the alternate universe offered by a book, the quiet space of a museum was my favorite place to go. My mom said I was an escapist at heart . . . that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one. It’s true that I’ve always been able to yank myself out of this world and plunge myself into another.”

“I actually prefer Abby," she said."I'm sorry?""Nobody calls me Abigail unless it's my mom and she's mad.”

“She preferred imaginary heroes to real ones, because when tired of them, the former could be shut up in the tin kitchen till called for, and the latter were less manageable.”

“When people say that this kind of fantasy fiction is escapist and evading the real world, well I think that’s an evasion. It’s actually trying to confront something that most people would rather not confront.”

“The real world is much smaller than the imaginary”