“And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books.""Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.”

“What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.”

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”

“... the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.”

“I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes.”

“This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.”

“And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.”