We Live and Breathe Words

                                  
"We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone, again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone."
My favorite book quote is a quote about books.
I am not sure how many people out there are familiar with this quote, but it is pretty popular within Cassandra Clare's following. Cassandra Clare is the author of the Shadowhunter Chronicles and Magisterium, the author of the character who said this. The character who said this, William Herondale, in The Infernal Devices, was "cursed" and believed that everyone who loved him would die. He extracted himself from his family and ran away to people who learned to love him even though he made himself as horrible as possible. He was telling the girl that he is in love with that books kept him from doing something that he'd eventually regret. Later in the trilogy, he learned that he was not cursed, and he regretted everything hurtful he'd done to anyone he'd come in contact with. The quote remained though, and so has my love for it.
Why is this the quote that encompasses me as a whole? Thanks for asking! I live and breathe words, too. I surround myself with them everyday, every hour, taking them in and consuming them, taking them to heart. Stories and authors of stories have made me who I am and I could not be more grateful. They changed the way I thought about certain aspects of life and make me think harder and deeper every time I read something new.
The second line is a bit grim, but true for the character. Not for me. I can say honestly, though, that when I was upset, I turned myself over to a book and let that take me away from reality for a while. I would turn myself into the character and made myself believe that the problem the character had was the exact issue I had. All problems in books are solvable, I learned. In life, it doesn't seem like that, but they are solvable. Everyone has to learn that, and books are one way I figured that out.
During the move from one house to another, all my books got packed away. For more than six months, they've been sitting somewhere in boxes. I cannot wait to unpack them and read them again, not realizing how certain ones being gone would affect me. I still had a couple books left, my favorites, in my small room, taken to school, carried in my purse when we went five minutes away to Target. I would read and walk at the same time, tuning the world out and surrounding myself in the story. It wasn't very hard to forget about the mean house people or the rude cheerleading parents if I kept my head down in a book. I might have looked alone, reading in the hallways and in between bells at my old school, but I was anything but. Characters are like old friends to me, people I surround myself with in my head and I was certainly never alone when I had a book in my hands.
This link is for you to use at your leisure, full of a fraction of quotes in the popular book series, The Infernal Devices written by Cassandra Clare. This is one of my absolute favorite book series' and I hope you enjoy the quotes there so much that you find yourself entranced and wanting to read the books.