Anna Van Someren

“We used to call it the World Wide Web, but at some point the world had dropped out. The wide was gone. It was a narrow web connecting us to those who would never love us back.”
― Rebecca Schiff, The Bed Moved

“Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
― Franz Kafka

“Gray and I talked about library school the way draft dodgers talked about Canada.”
― Rebecca Schiff, The Bed Moved

“The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates