In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the “shalt nots” of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of my favorite childhood books, A Wrinkle in Time, described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequent universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.
-Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life (1998)
That made my heart smile
Beautiful.
Really wonderful. I do consider my reading to be another world which I go to every time I sit down with my book.
That’s why she’s a writer and I’m not: she can express her heart (and mine).
Thank you for sharing this wonderful quotation.
I just love Anna Quindlen!
Love!
That is beautiful.
Oh, I love it!
I wholeheartedly agree. I tell my students (at risk k-6) that books can take them anywhere.
‘A Wrinkle in Time’ is still one of my all time favorites. When I first read it as an adolescent, it made me believe that I could do anything.
I love Quindlen and this is a great quote.
A Wrinkle in Time is one of my favorites too. I suppose child readers often get described as being in their own world, and it’s true, in way! Thanks for posting this!