Garrett Haskell

“Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of place and of face, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance as it has done in many others.”
― Sir Walter Scott, Tales of My Landlord. Incl: The Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montrose, Count Robert of Paris & Castle Dangerous.

“[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“But he'd never seen anything like this before. And he'd never felt anything like it, either. The closest he could think of was when he and Blink were immersed in a book together. Sometimes a strange feeling would come over them as they'd race through the pages, and the words would dissolve, and they'd find themselves deep inside Oz, or Narnia, or the Andes, or Africa, where everything was real and vidid and alive.
Stories could do that, but this wasn't story. This was a house. And no matter how real a story seemed, you still couldn't eat the food, or pick up the plates, or warm yourself by the fire.”
― Brian Selznick

“It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.”
― John Steinbeck