Nina Sankovitch Quotes

Sorrow is the violent smashing of reason, in that reason has no power over it.

Because being witness to all types of human experience is important to understanding the world, but also to understanding myself. To define what is important to me, and who is important, and why.

Tolstoy wrote, 'The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.' He understood this service as a religious duty. For me, I understand it as a fact of life, as THE fact of life. What we do for each other is what survives. My sister is dead, but everything she did for me while she was alive is still going strong. I can still feel her hand reaching across the backseat of our car in Berlin, and I still hear her voice, our conversations going late into the night.

I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.

Books. The more I thought about how to stop and get myself back together as one sane, whole person, the more I thought about books. I thought about escape. Not running to escape but reading to escape. Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that "words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living." That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.

The value of experience, real or imagined, is that is shows us how to - or how NOT to - live. In reading about different characters and the consequences of their choices, I was finding myself changed. I was discovering new and distinct ways of undergoing life's sorrows and joys ...
and all the great books I was reading - were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books ARE experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. i had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

Books are reason to get up in the morning.

My hiatus is over, my soul and body are healed, but I will never leave the purple chair for long. So many books waiting to be read, so much happiness to be found, so much wonder to be revealed.

I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister's and my own, and, damn, I'd better live well.

A book isn't just a friend, but makes friends for you

Our house was open to anyone who needed a little extra support or comfort or just a home-cooked meal.

Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable.

Life is hard, unfair, painful. But life is also guaranteed - one hundred percent, no doubt, no question - to offer unexpected and sudden moments of beauty, joy, love, acceptance, euphoria. The good stuff. It is our ability to recognize and then hold on to the moments of good stuff that allows us to survive, even thrive. And when we can share the beauty, hope is restored.

Cyril Connolly, twentieth-century writer and critic, wrote that 'words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.' That was how I wanted to use books: as an escape back to life. I wanted to engulf myself in books and come up whole again.
p.20

We all need a space to just let things be, a place to remember who we are and what is important to us, an interval of time that allows the happiness and joy of living back into our consciousness.