Tahereh Mafi, in Shatter Me, wrote ‘I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.’

Interwoven web of words, comprised of letters, created by sentences. So many things in that quote resonate with me. Can’t you feel that complete immersion in the story?

For those of you who love books, doesn’t this make you remember a favorite, maybe from when you were a child, that opened the world of stories for you?

And for those of you who, like me, spent so much time in the story world as a child, teenager, young woman, don’t you recognize yourself in some of her phrases? While I didn’t live with the absence of human relationships, I do realize now, looking back, how  life passed by without me seeing the real world for the imaginary.

I came across this quote in Goodreads. I haven’t read Shatter Me but since Ms. Mafi just looked into my storied soul, I am going to.