Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

All literature is protest.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.

I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em.

What could I dream of that had the barest possibility of coming true? I could think of nothing. And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason.