Quotes from Sara Nelson

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

When things go right, I read. When things go wrong, I read more.

Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and book to someone who's never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin.

Reading's ability to beam you up to a different world is a good part of the reason why people like me do it in the first place---because dollar for dollar, hour per hour, it's the most expedient way to get from our proscribed little here to an imagined, intriguing there. Part time machine, part Concorde, part ejector seat, books are our salvation.

But my subconscious mind--the part I've heard writers call the lizard brain--could and did: it told me to reach for Anne Lamott or Edith Wharton or Calvin Trillin instead. And if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself.

Clearly she knew that between book lovers, a novel is not a novel is not a novel. It's a symbol, an offering -- and sometimes a test

You know you're in a bad patch when the most interesting part of the book you're reading is the acknowledgments page.

I m not about to tell him that I am just like Anna and Emma, an adulteress. My books are my secret lovers, the friends I run to to get away from the daily drudgeries of life, to try out something new, and yes, to get away, for a few hours, from him. He doesn't need to know that my books are the affairs I don't have.

Why bother with other people's worlds made of words? was his philosophy.

if I've learned one thing in my decades on earth, it's this: Don't argue with your lizard brain; it knows you better than you know yourself.

How do you choose your books?' my friends had asked. Less than a week into my project, I can now tell them the beginning of the truth. I don't always choose the books, I'll say. Sometimes the books choose me.