““I didn’t read to escape. I didn’t even read to be entertained. It was more elemental, more essential than that. I read because imagination was the only thing that elevated me beyond my own reality. To look at my world as my only plane of existence was so limiting, and a little depressing. I needed the boundless worlds I found in good fiction. I could stare at the characters and obsess over them. But they couldn’t stare back. They couldn’t ask me any questions, or know me. They couldn’t ever love me but they couldn’t judge or reject me, either. They couldn’t react to me. It was kind of like stalking, but a character in a novel can’t get a restraining order.””
