Quotes from Elizabeth Joy Arnold

We think we know our friends, our lovers, but really all we know is pieces of them

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled, "This could change your life." —Helen Exley

I ran my finger over the text, then held the book up to my face, closed my eyes, and inhaled the sweet-sour scent of old paper and binding glue. Did everyone who loved books do this when they encountered a new one?

All the best stories in the world were of escape.

How could the people around me not see that I'd been spending my day in nineteenth-century Kansas, or in the pit of a giant peach? It was like I was the only one living in the real world, and they were skating blindly over an opaque surface above me.

I loved the physicality of books just as much as the stories inside, the feel of pages between my fingers, the intricacies of classic fonts winding along the neatly lined rows of words.

Right and wrong, I learned that day, could not really be taught after all, only felt.

could one do a compatibility test based on favourite books? Could an Anais Nin fan love a Dean Koontz fan? An Alice Munro woman love a James Joyce man?

Strong is on the inside, a root that keeps you standing whatever might hit you. But hard is only on the outside, this shield you put up to keep all the pain on the inside from showing. The soft inside is still there even when you don't let yourself see it. And the shell keeps you safe, but it also keeps the good things from penetrating; love and trust and joy.

I remembered how it had been first learning to read, how the squiggles of print finally organized themselves slowly and painfully into words, then pieced together into sentences with meaning. Now, for the first time, the squiggles were releasing actual worlds... All of them surfacing from the page so real that when I finally closed my eyes, I was amazed their lives didn't continue around me. A whole world somehow tucked back into the book, waiting for me to set it free.

I'm a woman who loves words, but there are times there are no words.

I'll probably never again feel as intensely about books, read as desperately, and fall as deeply in love with stories and characters as I did that summer. Now when I read, I'm continuously trying to bring back that same immersion, fall in love again, and I judge every book against that impossible ideal. The books I love now aren't necessarily those that are written best, they're those books, like The Thorn Birds and Clan Of The Cave Bear, that bring me closest to that magic.

I know how you're feeling, because for me it's like that every day, like life's this huge big ocean that could swallow me and no walls or floor to hold on to. So of course you want to grab hold of whatever you're used to grabbing,

Tolkien said that you shouldn't leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near him.

Hearing this I felt myself splitting away from myself, something I've been doing for years, a false calm that floated somewhere above my real mind, which I could sit inside when dealing with my mother.