Noa

“When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal,”
― Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

“Children's books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place.”
― Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

“Desires Like the beautiful bodies of those who died young,
tearfully interred in a grand mausoleum
with roses by their heads and jasmine at their feet –
so seem those desires that have passed
without fulfilment; without a single night
of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.”
― Constantinos P. Cavafis, Selected Poems

“I was in college when I first saw You've Got Mail, and I loved Kathleen Kelly instantly. I was mostly past my wistful gade-school days of wishing myself into every novel I read, but I was alarmingly struck by how she echoed my old fear of settling for my real life, musing in one scene, "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"

Her impetus was this: once she'd read a story about a butterfly in a subway train, and then...she saw one! The film shows Kathleen rattling along on the train, an open book in her lap, when a butterfly suddenly flits into her field of vision. You can see her visceral delight. That thing she'd only read about had come true.

Yet she wondered if her experience was cheapened because she'd read it before she lived it, and my twenty-year-old self wondered right along with her. But I'm not the girl--or the reader--I was then, and I now know the times when reading cheapens anything are few and far between. I've seen how our on -the-page experiences set the stage for our actual lives. Our books frame the scenes for us so we can better understand and experience what's happening when it happens to us--”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life