Katarina Bivald Quotes

It was just that she wondered when, exactly, she had become so old. Perhaps it had happened when her mother died. Some kind of generational shift. The mantel being passed.

You've got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books, at least to begin with.

how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not,

She had kept well behind the safety barrier her entire life, but now she was standing there at the edge of the precipice for the very first time, fumbling blindly with the realization that there were other ways to live, at how intense and rich life could be.

I've seen people survive terrible things. ... I've also seen people completely caught up in their problems. They practically creep in beneath the skin and eat them up from within, until it seems as though their reaction to the problem is worse than the problem itself ever was. They grow cruel and bitter too, so it's difficult to remember to feel sorry for them.

You know, life would be so much simpler if it weren't for all the people. ... People are overrated. I'm sure I would be able to deal with things much better if it weren't for them.

I've always thought that books have some kind of healing power and that they can, if nothing else, provide a distraction.

I've had my sorrows, of course, but nothing more than I could cope with. Sometimes I think that it's not the degree of sorrow which matters, but how much of a hold it can get. Maybe some people are just more susceptible, or maybe everyone is more susceptible at certain times.

Can you smell it? The scent of new books. Unread adventures. Friends you haven't met yet, hours of magical escapism awaiting you.

If he had learned anything in life, it was that there were no happy endings. Life simply went on.

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.

A complete waste of time - doubting yourself. If you make the slightest mistake, someone else is sure to let you know about it.

People expected too much from forgiveness.

Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read.

Just look educated. How hard can it be? Off you go." It

She had never been someone who believed you needed to have met in person to be friends - many of her most rewarding relationships had been with people who didn't even exist.

WARNING: UNHAPPY ENDING! she wrote. If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning against drinking and driving, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues to hand.

She had always hoped that Jane could have looked out over her surroundings and thought: 'I can create a better world than this', or 'You're much too unbearably boring, and perhaps I can't say anything about it without being impolite, but you are going to be absolutely wonderful in my next book. I need another ridiculous minister.' Still, Sara couldn't help but wonder what life must be like if you couldn't daydream about Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (how had she decided on that name? One of literary history's most inexplicable mysteries), because you yourself had created him.

Very few people had sense enough to appreciate silence.

One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.

I think I've lived a happy life. I know I've been lucky. I've had good friends and kind people around me.

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.

Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial or so long. It must have been a frightening realization: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories that would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.

That night, Sara sat in Amy's library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met.

She had thrown herself into one ambitious reading project after another, but things had rarely gone according to plan. It was boring to think of books as something you should read just because others had, and besides, she was much too easily distracted. There were far too many books out there to stick to any kind of theme. When

Books that had already been read were the best.

What else was there beside books and work?

As early as high school, she had realized that few people paid attention to you if you were hidden behind a book.

That which didn't kill them made them stranger.

Maybe that proves I was right about books and people: books are fantastic and probably come into their own in a cabin in the woods, but how fun is it to read a fantastic book if you can't tell others about it, talk about it, quote from it constantly?

Maybe it's that the past exists purely inside me. ... I've never cared about growing old, but right now, I do, slightly. It's not just that you have so much less future, but you also lose so much of your past, one death at a time.

Books or people, you ask. It's a difficult choice, I've got to say. I don't know whether people mean more than books - they're definitely not nicer or funnier or more comforting ... but still, however much I twist and turn the question, I've got to opt for people in the long run. I hope you don't lose all confidence in me now that I've admitted that.
I can't for the life of me explain why I have the bad sense to prefer people. If you went purely by numbers, then books would win hands down. I've loved maybe a handful of people in my entire life, compared with tens or maybe even hundreds of books (and here I'm counting only those books I've really loved, the kind that make you happy just to look at them, that make you smile regardless of what else is happening in your life, that you always turn back to like an old friend and can remember exactly where you first "met" them - I'm sure you know just what I'm talking about). But that handful of people you love ... they're surely worth just as much as all those books.

I really can't say which of the American classics you should read. In fact, I think about as much of the notion of "classic" as you do, but at least the literary critics who compile those lists have a good sense of humor. How else can you explain them adding Mark Twain's wonderful books to their lists, given his view that "a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to read"? Unless it's some kind of disguised jibe, but they surely can't be that petty.
Though I don't think that justice is the main argument against classics list. Or rather, in a way it's clearly a question of justice, but not against those who don't make it. No, the books I feel sorry for are the ones they add to these lists. Take Mark Twain again. Once, when Tom was young, he came to me complaining that he had to read Huckleberry Finn for junior high. Huckleberry Finn! Our critics and educators have got a lot to answer for when they manage to make young boys see stories about rebellion and adventure and ballsiness as a chore. Do you understand what I mean? The real crime of these lists isn't that they leave deserving books off them, but that they make people see fantastic literary adventures as obligations.

People were strange like that. They could be completely uninterested in you, but the moment you picked up a book, you were the one being rude.

I know there are those who doubt that racism is still such a big problem, but if you ask me, it's only middle-aged people who think that, those who think the world has automatically become better simply because they're old enough to shape it now, but without any of them having made the slightest contribution to improving it.