The Echo of Old Books

by Barbara Davis

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.

Because even now, after all the mistakes I’ve made with my life—and I’ve made many—you are the one I regret most. You have been the capital error of my life, the one regret for which there can be no absolution, no peace. For you or for me.

Beneath each faded jacket and scarred board is a life, a noble deed, a bruised heart, a lost love, a journey taken.

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.”

The little intimacies that develop with time, the things that bind lovers inextricably together, are no part of what we have. In fact, we’re still strangers in many ways, two people who stumbled blindly into love, never once imagining a happily ever after.

We develop a particular fondness for our favorite books, the way they feel and smell and sound, the memories they invoke, until they begin to exist for us as living, breathing things.

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.

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

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

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.