Sarah Anne Peterson

“In times of struggle, there are as many reasons not to read as there are to breathe. Don’t you have bigger things to do? Reading, let alone re-reading, is the terrain of milquetoasts and mopey spinsters. At life’s ugliest junctures the very act of opening a book can smack of cowardly escapism. Who chooses to read when there’s work to be done?

Call me a coward if you will, but when the line between duty and sanity blurs, you can usually find me curled up with a battered book, reading as if my mental health depended on it. And it does, for inside the books I love I find food, respite, escape, and perspective.”
― Erin Blakemore, The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.”
― Jodi Picoult and Samantha Van Leer, Between the Lines

“Then a hundred sad voices lifted a wail,
And a hundred glad voices piped on the gale:
'Time is short, life is short,' they took up the tale:
'Life is sweet, love is sweet, use to-day while you may;
Love is sweet, and to-morrow may fail;
Love is sweet, use to-day.”
― Christina Rossetti, The Complete Poems

“What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth.”
― Christina Rossetti