Mél ☽

“But the transport of a novel, the false awareness of being within another time,
place and life that was the pleasure of reading, for her, was not possible. She
was in another time, place, consciousness; it pressed in upon her and filled her as someone’s breath fills a balloon’s shape. She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete with what she was finding she did not know, could not have imagined or discovered through imagination.”
― Nadine Gordimer, July's People

“I'd rather have my job than yours."
"Why?"
"Because your job deals very largely with what we call right and
wrong — and I'm not at all sure that there's any such thing.
Suppose it's all a question of glandular secretion. Too much of
one gland, too little of another — and you get your murderer,
your thief, your habitual criminal. Clement, I believe the time will
come when we'll be horrified to think of the long centuries in
which we've indulged in what you may call moral reprobation, to
think how we've punished people for disease — which they can't
help, poor devils. You don't hang a man for having tuberculosis.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage

“Reading it feels like going out to the sea from the sands: at first, the waves are gentle and shy against my feet on the shoreline, lukewarm and sweet; but as I go farther and farther into the waters, the waves crash over me, cold and unrelenting, submerging me, leaving me gasping for breath, until finally, I am drowning in the story. It’s a bit like falling in love.”
― Aamna Qureshi, If I Loved You Less

“She did have one book—a thick paperback snatched up in passing, until that moment something bought years ago and never read, perhaps it was meant for this kind of situation: Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, in translation as The Betrothed. She did not want to begin it because what would happen when she had read it? There was no other. Then she overcame the taboo (if she did not read, they would find a solution soon; if she did read the book, they would still be here when it was finished).”
― Nadine Gordimer