My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues QUOTES

1 " You should read this book’ almost never simply means you should read this book. It is usually far more fraught. Telling someone what to read, even asking politely, can feel more like an entreaty or an implied judgment or a there’s-something-you-should-know than a straightforward proposal. If you read this book, then you love me. If you read this book, then you respect my opinions. If you read this book, you will understand what it is I need you to understand and can’t explain to you myself. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

2 " Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. ‘You have to read a book at the right time for you,’ Lessing also said, ‘and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

3 " When I look through Bob, the actual stories between his mottled covers may have been written by others, but they belong to me now. Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way. Each of us could say the same about our respective reading trajectories. Even if we don’t keep a physical Book of Books, we all hold our books somewhere inside us and live by them. They become our stories. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

4 " Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

5 " When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn’t recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

6 " Books gnaw at me from around the edges of my life, demanding more time and attention. I am always left hungry. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

7 " Before every elementary school classroom had a 'Drop Everything and Read' period, before parents and educators agonized more about children being glued to Call of Duty or getting sucked into the vortex of the Internet, reading as a childhood activity was not always revered. Maybe it was in some families, in some towns, in some magical places that seemed to exist only in stories, but not where I was. Nobody trotted out the kid who read all the time as someone to be admired like the ones who did tennis and ballet and other feats requiring basic coordination.

While those other kids pursued their after-school activities in earnest, I failed at art, gymnastics, ice skating, soccer, and ballet with a lethal mix of inability, fear and boredom. Coerced into any group endeavor, I wished I could just be home already. Rainy days were a godsend because you could curl up on a sofa without being banished into the outdoors with an ominous 'Go play outside.'

Well into adulthood, I would chastise myself over not settling on a hobby—knitting or yoga or swing dancing or crosswords—and just reading instead. The default position. Everyone else had a passion; where was mine? How much happier I would have been to know that reading was itself a passion. Nobody treated it that way, and it didn't occur to me to think otherwise. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

8 " Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other's first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we'd never truly tasted it before. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

9 " To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours. They're also theirs. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

10 " This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

11 " At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

12 " The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an “anti-library,” a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one’s personal trove should contain as much of what you don’t know as possible. Some "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

13 " At the office I worked in before that, my boss required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

14 " Like all collectors, I exist in a perpetual state of want that bears no reasonable relationship to the quantity of unread books mounting up on my shelves. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

15 " At the office I worked in before that, my required all employees to take a personality test that divided us neatly into one of four quadrants: Doers, Creators, Deciders, or Thinkers, categories that would then define our roles in the department. Most of the others were Doers; there were a couple of Deciders, too. I was the only Thinker. My first thought was, I think I need to get out of here. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

16 " I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me—many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read. The "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

17 " When we read, we are spying on someone else’s imagination and inhabiting it; the authors and their characters are momentarily our friends, even if they betray us, or we them. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

18 " Dark books say to us, “This isn’t about you. You are in fact alive and safe.” Yes, there’s an implicit and unavoidable warning, an edge of danger; these things happen, the books say. And yet, as bad as it gets inside this book, you, the reader, are securely outside. If "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

19 " For a girl who often felt like she lived more in the cozy world of books than in the unforgiving world of the playground, a book of books was the richest journal imaginable; it showed a version of myself I recognized and felt represented me. Over "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

20 " To quote Virginia Woolf, “If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.” Instead, Woolf urged, “open your mind as widely as possible … and it will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. "

― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues