An extrovert looks at a stack of books and sees a stack of papers, while an introvert looks at the same stack and sees a soothing source of escape.

Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

I used to love lulling, running water – a sound so infrequent in cityscapes. Its loss always made me feel lonely when I lived amongst concrete.

We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands. Then we ran. We ran blindly, and men and houses streaked past us in a torrent without shape.

Sometimes we hold on to the good and the better for a very long time that we don't even know when we allowed the best to slip away from our hands.

It’s unpleasant magic, the kind that darkens the senses, the kind no one wants to experience, but once in a lifetime might not be able to avoid.

If I had wings I would fly,I'd soar on high where only eagles dareI'd let them rip, I'd let them tear, until all that remained was me bare.

If you only have one world, one life, then however brilliant it is most of the time, you have nowhere to run when you need to escape from it for a while.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

The hurts from my last day with my father are healed now, but I want to remember where they were; I want to remember what I escaped for as long as I live.

Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Leaving what is safe so you can be more, Derek said. The cage is what the bird knows; the sky is all the things he still wants to do even if it's a risk.

Running my fastest not from my past. Running from those who have hurt me in it. And, they can't catch me anymore. I escaped from the land of make believe.

Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.