Sarah Chihaya > Quotes

“A clever terrible reader, sure, but a terrible reader nonetheless. I was always reading for something: first, for comfort, for pleasure, for validation, for comprehension; later, for symptoms, for ideas, for citation, for tenure. And always, secretly, for salvation.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“The cruelest thing about reading is when you find the perfect book — the one that mirrors your life exactly. It resonates completely with your inner world, with your emotional currents — this book speaks to you. All of us, as readers, long to find that book. But we rarely stop to consider what it would truly mean if we did. It would be an annihilation, a miniature destruction of you as both a reader and a writer. Because that book — that perfect book — could have been written by you. But it wasn’t.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“I wanted to wrap myself in it, to burrow inside it—not in the scholarly convolutions of the book’s plot but really inside the vibrant grain of its texture, the very fibers of its style.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“When I think back to how it felt to live in my parents’ home, my body immediately reconfigures into this obedient and fearful marionette, a shivering network of suspended parts that timidly awaits instruction to come together as a body in movement.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“I am convinced that it is every writer’s fear that our books will be the death of us. For me, for a long time, this fear was literal.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“What had happened? Nothing. I think that was the problem. If I could have a wonderful night with my friends and still be overwhelmed by nothing at all, still feel nothing was simply too much - well, it was all over.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“That's the annoying fact that challenges all writing about depression: It is just not a good story. It usually does not have a clearly defined beginning or ending; it's mostly just terrible, boring middle, after terrible, boring middle.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“...there is too much self in my reading.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia

“Maybe my diffuseness began not with reading but with the fact that, as a child, I was always crying. I still am. I am always just a sharp word or a loud noise away from that feeling of dissolution that starts simultaneously near the brain and the diaphragm—a fine splitting somewhere in the sinuses up top, and beneath, somewhere deep under the breastbone, a quiet, hollow pain. Think about the phrases we use to describe the lack of integrity brought on by weeping: you “dissolve into tears” or “break down crying.” You can even cry various parts of yourself—your eyes, your heart—right out.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia: A Memoir

“How important it is to read a book that so undoes you that it becomes a precious token of your own destruction to carry to the end of your days.”
― Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia