“only then did I wake out of the book.”— John McGahern Related Quotes “A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”— Alice Munro “Flowers for Algernon again? she asks. Doesn’t that book always make you cry?One day it won’t, I say. I want to be sure to be reading it on that day.”— Nicola Yoon “I wonder how many books you have read?”— Lailah Gifty Akita