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Quote by Deborah M. Hathaway

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To Know Miss May

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Deborah M. Hathaway

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“Sorry’s just a word to try to get out of something, to dodge trouble if you’ve been caught out. Sorry’s a five-letter disgrace that shouldn’t even need to be used. It should be abolished from the f*cking dictionary. Actions do speak louder than words, and if she’s as sorry as she makes out in her voicemails, then why does she sometimes look happy? Why is she going out partying with her friends? Kissing guys who—shockingly—vanish days later? Why does she dance around her apartment, singing ridiculous songs about love? Why is she living her life without me? If the b*tch is sorry, then why is she only looking me up on the internet and not hunting for me? Why isn’t she looking for me? It f*cking irks me that she didn’t visit me, not once. I refused any and all visitation from others, but I asked her to come and see me. I wrote to her the first two years, waiting patiently for a written reply, a presence, a smile to my f*cking face that never came. She left me in there to rot. Well, little sister, no need to look for me anymore. I’m right here, and I intend to stick around until I’ve broken you.”

“Reading on a computer screen gives you no sense of time or investment. The page always looks the same, and everything is always in the same exact spot. When reading the book, no matter how large or small it is, a tension builds, concurrent with your progress through its pages. I get a nervous excitement as I see the number of pages that remain to be read draining inexorably from the right to the left.”

“How nice, then, to go to Waterstones and not to have to disinfect yourself when you get home; yet sometimes as a reader I feel nostalgic for disorder, for the random and unpredictable. I find myself wanting to be free from categorization, or to introduce another kind; I wish bookshops had a shelf called Really Interesting Books. We all know what a RIB is, I think. It's a book that is about more than you imagined when first you picked it up. RIBs are like treasure maps—the marks on the paper are only symbolic indications of the riches to be recovered. They tell you things you always somehow knew, but had never been able to articulate. A RIB is like going on your travels, but also somehow like arriving home.”

“Millions of books have been burned in the senseless violence of war. Many rulers in the past, and the present, feel threatened by stories and ideas and knowledge. They know that books can change people. They know that books can change the world. To them, this is dangerous. They don't want people to learn, to understand, to think for themselves. They don't want people to remember their history.”