A beautiful quote from Russo:
Most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.
I pretty much stopped buying digital books after Klara was born and went back to buying paper books. I want her to have the kind of childhood where she can come up to a bookcase, pull out a random book, and discover the world through it. And then pull out another, and another, and so on.
Hm. I play a lot of games, which get criticised quite often for being tiny little self-congratulatory solipsism machines, so I’ve become rather sensitive to things that celebrate liking the thing in question.
Is it me, or is modern literature really more likely to congratulate the figure of the reader in some way? I swear I’ve now read more than one book where there is one to one ratio of how bookish a character is and how good of a person they turn out to be by the end of the book.
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Hilarious. And true! Yes, that’s definitely a thing.
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That’s just a paraphrase of Henry Thoreau:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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