Take note the next time you bring a book home, what it feels like before you open it and you settle down with the words. That moment before you begin reading, it's like standing on the edge of something great and new, a different world entirely or perhaps completely similar to your own. You are on the precipice of something possibly deeply exciting or enriching. You are about to plunge into a story, a life, that may change your views or your beliefs or perhaps shape you into a different being.
Now that you think about it, it's pretty amazing isn't it?
When people ask me, the self-confessed bookworm, why do you read so much, well, the answer is always the same.
To escape.
When reality seems overwhelming, when you look around and find yourself in a shroud of loneliness, all it takes is a book. Just a book.
It can be your friend, your companion or your key to a world where you can forget everything and be a fly on the wall in somebody else's life. Also, fictional characters turn out to be much better than real people. Less disappointing, you know? And much more relatable.
I found my favourite book a couple of weeks ago.
What's your favourite book? Now that's a question I liked to dodge, being never quite sure of my answer.
But now I know.
Why am I even talking about the moment before you open a book? It's because you never know. You never know when you might turn the page and discover that this is your favourite book. You never know how a book may affect you, make an impact, mold you into a different person.
You just never know.
My favourite book is Looking for Alaska by John Green. I often try to explain why I love it so much but explaining why you love something or someone can prove to be quite difficult. The word 'love' itself cannot be explained.
Anyways, here are some lines from the book which I consider to have made an impact on me.
“The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible.”
“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”
“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.”
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
“I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn’t.”
"I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you just repeat what you've already said with phrases like In summation and To conclude. I didn't do that. Instead, I talked about why I thought it was an important question. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."
“How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?”
You know, I consider Alaska Young to be my alter ego. The part of me that I somehow keep hidden and never show anybody else...I know, because as soon as I met her in the book, it felt like I already knew her.
I goddamn love this book to bits.
So I know you should read it.
xoxo vami-kat
Now that you think about it, it's pretty amazing isn't it?
When people ask me, the self-confessed bookworm, why do you read so much, well, the answer is always the same.
To escape.
When reality seems overwhelming, when you look around and find yourself in a shroud of loneliness, all it takes is a book. Just a book.
It can be your friend, your companion or your key to a world where you can forget everything and be a fly on the wall in somebody else's life. Also, fictional characters turn out to be much better than real people. Less disappointing, you know? And much more relatable.
I found my favourite book a couple of weeks ago.
What's your favourite book? Now that's a question I liked to dodge, being never quite sure of my answer.
But now I know.
Why am I even talking about the moment before you open a book? It's because you never know. You never know when you might turn the page and discover that this is your favourite book. You never know how a book may affect you, make an impact, mold you into a different person.
You just never know.
Until you read it.
My favourite book is Looking for Alaska by John Green. I often try to explain why I love it so much but explaining why you love something or someone can prove to be quite difficult. The word 'love' itself cannot be explained.
Anyways, here are some lines from the book which I consider to have made an impact on me.
“The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible.”
“It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t
the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful
things.”
“Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”
“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.”
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth,
thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be,
and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You
just use the future to escape the present.”
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
“I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn’t.”
“Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there’. I
don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s
beautiful.”
"I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you just repeat what you've already said with phrases like In summation and To conclude. I didn't do that. Instead, I talked about why I thought it was an important question. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to."
You know, I consider Alaska Young to be my alter ego. The part of me that I somehow keep hidden and never show anybody else...I know, because as soon as I met her in the book, it felt like I already knew her.
I goddamn love this book to bits.
So I know you should read it.
xoxo vami-kat
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