Rachel

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accesible experience of every river I've seen, swum in, fished, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These "rivers" are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction's ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I'll dip beneath its surface. (I'm a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river's rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park-spackled with ice. Or-the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens-of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city...)

This is a word's dormant power, brimming with pertinence. So little is needed from the author, when you think of it.

(We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly - details are scant, and what details there are appear drab - but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be make for walking - the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist