Nina had looked around and realized she would never run out of things to read, and that certainty filled her with peace and satisfaction. It didn’t matter what hit the fan; as long as there were unread books in the world, she would be fine.
Being surrounded by books was the closest she’d ever gotten to feeling like the member of a gang. The books had her back, and the nonfiction, at least, was ready to fight if necessary.
Oh my God, she thought, it’s hard to be human sometimes, with the pressure to be civilized lying only very thinly over the brain of a nervous little mammal.
Tomorrow would be better. At the very least, tomorrow would be different.
Nina was enjoying the book; the writing was beautiful, the characters were real, the situations were bittersweet, but it was after an hour or so of reading that she came across a line that struck her so forcefully she had to close the book for a moment: “I’m lonely, ” the young character Ulysses said, “and I don’t know what I’m lonely for.
Biology is not destiny. And love is not proportionate to shared DNA.
Then don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow, baby. Don’t worry about how it might go wrong; just let yourself be happy.
Nina looked down and smiled. She’d never felt more at home than she did at Knight’s, with the plentiful sarcasm and soothing rows of book spines. It was heaven on earth. Now, if they could only get rid of the customers and lock the front doors, they’d really be onto something.
Nina could tell from his tone of voice that her new nephew was a morning person, that despicable breed.
Sometimes life is just what it is, and the best you can hope for is ice cream.
Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence. She enjoyed people – she really did – she just needed to take them in homeopathic doses; a little of the poison was the cure.
Is book smart the only smart that counts?
You do realize it isn’t mandatory to live your life online, right? For thousands of years we managed to be miserable or joyful in private. You can still do it.
Life will throw you major curveballs, but it’s rare you can do much more than duck.
Surely her purpose in life wasn’t simply to read as many books as possible?
Coming out of a book was always painful.
The trivia, the reading, the book club... they were simply weapons of self-defense.
It was one of the paradoxes of parenting that the children you wished you had were actually the versions of your own children that other parents saw.
Was he mad at her? It was so difficult in text, and she wondered if her generation’s reliance on written communication was making them better writers or simply more confused people. Body language told you so much; text on its own was subject to misinterpretation in every way possible. You’d think they’d all get very good at subtletly and vocabulary, in order to make their brief conversations more precise, but she hadn’t noticed that trend.
As a child she’d been told she had ADD, or ADHD, or some other acronym, but her school librarian had simply clicked her tongue and told her she was imaginative and creative and couldn’t be expected to wait for everyone else to catch up.