Alli Baker’s Reviews > The Midnight Library > Status Update

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see? And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming.”

“To be apart of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.”

“She had thought, in her nocturnal & suicidal hours,that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature, solitude took in a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself, herself & the world.