Karen Joy Fowler Quotes

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

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

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

I was never bored because I always had a book. So I had a doorway into another world or another universe. It was great.

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

If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library.

Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.

I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.

Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from being a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation.

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

I think books were my salvation, they saved me from being miserable.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

In this job, there are some simple pleasures that really help you cope. One is books, I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else.

Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard.

…books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other.

In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Books afford the surest relief in the most melancholy moments.

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.