“There were others, such as Jack London,who offered their readers such a respite from the miserable horror of existence that their books were like gifts from the gods. (Character of Tristan Sadler in "the Absolutist")”

“The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level ‒ there weren't any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader's head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer's work and skill and the reader's imagination. Parents, of a sort.”

“Jack London (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a huge financial success from writing. Source: Wikipedia”

“Simon's walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color,everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn't quite manga, wasn'tquite comic book.”

“They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth.”

“There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.”