The World Between Two Covers Quotes

“The danger with demanding authenticity, or 'spirit' of a place, in a book is that we look for what we expect to see and miss what is there. Instead of allowing the stories of a region to open our minds and lead us in new directions, we can become narrow and petty, demanding that regional literature conform to our expectations. Far from broadening our horizons, we risk shutting ourselves in a hall of mirrors where we see our version of the world reflect back at us ad infinitum.”
― Ann Morgan

“Freeing us from the obligation to get involved, fiction (and I would argue, memoirs...) allow us to enter wholeheartedly into the events described. We are as Keen puts it, in a 'safe zone'. These are not charity adverts crafted to manipulate our emotions with a view to making us take specific action. We do not have to watch our back or prepare out excuses in the thick of a story...And no one will judge us for failing to do any of these things, because the people and situations we have been reading about do not (or no longer exist). With the best will in the world, there is nothing we can do to change them- however much we might like to ...chuck Fantine a bob or two. We cannot even begin to try.”
― Ann Morgan

“As the German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser wrote, 'with reading there is no face-to face situation'; we have the luxury of getting rid of our faces too. Wed don't have to be ourselves, with all the logistical, financial and emotional complications that our lives entail. We don't really have to be anyone at all. And while we might never lose ourselves completely because we are, after all, the organism that brings the story to life at the moment, we can unclasp quite a lot of the inhibitions and worries that buckle us into who we are. Paradoxically, at the same time as being able to be more self indulgent by escaping into a world where no one can reasonably expect us to do anything, we have the luxury of putting ourselves and our needs, wants, and fears aside for a while; by being more selfish in a book we become less self-ish.”
― Ann Morgan

“In addition, things that I had lived with unthinkingly because they were widespread took on a new strangeness, and terms that made up part of the basic trappings of conversation started to chafe. I began to feel as never before how limiting catch-all labels for different groups in society are... Words such as 'black' or 'white' felt cramped and inadequate as a means of talking about ethnicity, suggesting, as they did , that I must have more in common with an Albanian donkey farmer than with the Zimbabwean-British family living down the hallway from me...

The same things held true for some of the terms I had been used to framing the world with. Words like 'developed' and 'developing' ... suddenly revealed themselves as Trojan horses packed with assumptions.”
― Ann Morgan