The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

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.”

The number of lives we are capable of living is limited only by the number of books we choose to read.

I have always imagined that closing a book is like pausing a film midframe, the characters frozen in their halted worlds, breath held, waiting for the reader to return and bring it all back to life—like a prince’s kiss in a fairy tale.

the echoes a person leaves behind are the by-products of the choices she makes—and perhaps, more critically, that changing those echoes is always possible.

It was another reminder—one she vowed never to forget—that people’s lives were defined not by the scars they acquired but by what lay on the other side of those scars, by what’s done with the life they have left.