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Feb. 17th, 2016 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bonnefoisHere's two quotes fromSurvival Lessons by Alice Hoffman that I really enjoyed:
It is possible that I became a novelist because of my mother's fear of being alone after her divorce. A novelist, after all, is never alone. We travel with hundreds of people, invented characters that have already been written or will someday appear on the page.
And I've often wondered if I spent too much time inside of books. If perhaps I ended up getting lost in there. I fear that reading, and later writing, stopped me from living a full life in the real world. I still don't know the answer to this, but I'm not sure I would have gotten past being twelve without Ray Bradbury, and I know imagining the plot for my novel The River King during a lengthy bone scan helped me get through that test. The hospital faded and I was walking through a small town where I knew everyone. I slipped into the river, past the water lilies , past the muddy shore. Here was my life raft. A book. When the technician told me the test was over, I was amazed, thinking we had just begun. But three hours had already passed. I'd been gone all that time. I'd been in another world entirely.
It is possible that I became a novelist because of my mother's fear of being alone after her divorce. A novelist, after all, is never alone. We travel with hundreds of people, invented characters that have already been written or will someday appear on the page.
And I've often wondered if I spent too much time inside of books. If perhaps I ended up getting lost in there. I fear that reading, and later writing, stopped me from living a full life in the real world. I still don't know the answer to this, but I'm not sure I would have gotten past being twelve without Ray Bradbury, and I know imagining the plot for my novel The River King during a lengthy bone scan helped me get through that test. The hospital faded and I was walking through a small town where I knew everyone. I slipped into the river, past the water lilies , past the muddy shore. Here was my life raft. A book. When the technician told me the test was over, I was amazed, thinking we had just begun. But three hours had already passed. I'd been gone all that time. I'd been in another world entirely.
