bookishjae

“To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.”
― William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“I wanted to say: I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. No, I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do, and, to use Whitman’s formulation, do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I don’t believe in miracles, but my survival is miraculous. Okay, then. So be it. The reality of my books—oh, call it magic realism if you must—is now the actual reality in which I’m living. Maybe my books had been building that bridge for decades, and now the miraculous could cross it. The magic had become realism. Maybe my books saved my life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“This is a book, and a book is a world, and words are the seeds in which meanings are curled. Pages of oceans and margins of land are civilizations you hold in the palm of your hand. But look at your world and your life seems to shrink to cities of paper and seas made of ink. Do you know who you are, or have you been misled? Are you the reader, or are you the read?”
― Traci Chee, The Reader