Liisa

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Am I crazy?" she asked. "I feel like I am sometimes."
"Maybe," he said, rubbing her forehead. "But don't worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you pay for having an imagination. It's your superpower. Tapping into the dream. It's a good thing not a bad thing.”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Although lacking the brocade and elements of ancient sacred ritual, a novel can be a kind of mirror room, too. It, too, is a liminal space, silent, bound by certain rituals and full of magic. The writer enters and seats herself in front of her reflection in the mirror. She collects herself and focuses her attention, and then she picks up a mask. She gazes at it and positions it on her face, and at that moment she is transformed into the protagonist of her story, looking out through its eyes at her reflection in the mirror, made strange by the face of another. It’s a complex sensation, impossible to describe exactly, but, oh, such lingering sweetness!
Then, because the world of novels is an endless hall of mirrors, that moment of transformation of writer into character is echoed by the reader when he or she opens the book and enters the mirror room, dons the mask, and becomes the character, too. This is why we read novels, after all, to see our reflections transformed, to enter another’s subjectivity, to wear another’s face, to live inside another’s skin.”
― Ruth Ozeki