The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

There is nothing quite so alive as a book that has been well loved.

There’s nothing more personal than a book, especially one that’s become an important part of someone’s life.”

“Books are feelings,”

Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present—and, if properly cared for, a future.

Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.

You’re a thread I don’t dare pull. Not because I’m afraid you won’t survive the unraveling but because I’m certain—even in this early moment—that I won’t.

Great metaphor!

We read not to escape life but to learn how to live it more deeply and richly, to experience the world through the eyes of the other.

He said all truly good writing—fiction or nonfiction—has a heartbeat, a life force that comes from the writer, like an invisible cord connecting them to the reader. Without it, the work is dead on arrival.”

You’re the answer to a prayer I never thought to pray—and a threat to all my plans—but I’m not strong enough to walk away. I want you. In whatever way it’s possible to have you, for however long it’s possible to have you. Knowing it’s a mistake, knowing it solves nothing. Knowing that one day we will stand here again, on the brink of goodbye.

From that very first night at the St. Regis, you have filled my brain, leaving no room for anyone else. Even with an ocean separating us, I could feel you, like the ache of a phantom limb.

In the happiest times of my life, I have reached for my books. In the saddest times of my life, my books have reached back. —Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books

I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. —Charles W. Eliot

“We’ve lost so much time, spent so many years blaming each other for things other people did. I’m still angry that they took so much from us, the time we can’t get back.