Literacy is the tool we use as humans to find one another, so it must belong to everyone.
If you keep pretending you're in that book, it will make you not want to live in the life you're in.
It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place
You know a great many things in dreams, often despite the evidence of your eyes. You just know them.
Stories never really end. . . even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.
Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said. . . "As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells. . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower. . . both strange and familiar.
Fire and water," he said, "don't really mix. You could say they're incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.
Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.
Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what. " "My mother didn't love me. " So what. "My husband won't ball me. So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone. " So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.
When you want to take over a city, you have to destroy the illusion of safety it provides. You have to hit the large well-protected establishments, find the powerful people who run them and are viewed as invincible, and kill them. You want to destroy the morale first. Once the people's resolve is gone and everyone is scared for their own skin, the city is yours.
Gourmandise is an impassioned, rational and habitual preference for all objects that flatter the sense of taste.