Gail Carson Levine Quotes

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

I prefer to be left alone with my books.

Blessed books—they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in.

Not that she objected to solitude. Quite the contrary. She had books, thank Heaven, quantities of books. All sorts of books.

I just go in my back garden. It's the only place where people don't come and bother you.

I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

I wanted to find a place to hide from all of it, where the nightmares and the rivers and reality couldn't find me. For me, that place was always inside a book.

Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.

Books. I'd probably spend all my time alone and lost in books if I could. It's easier that way.

You're never alone when you're reading a book.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think.

I read Dad's books like I did before, now things are crystal clear. Lock the door in the bathroom, now I just can't get caught in here.

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.

I'm with people all the time so I often go away on my own.

My life style in a sense is kind of private.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

I'm the most private person.

All my day is spent dealing with other people. When I come home I like it to be empty. The presence of others in my house kind of annoys me. I love coming home and shutting the doors. I feel brain dead. I'm relatively available, but not to live with.

I need, absolutely, to be alone.