"And she cried out in eternal ecstasy- for never before had she felt such hate and love for life."

No one can understand why books touch me so much. It's strange when I walk into Lit. class and everyone's talking about how they hate to read the assigned pages; how they can't bear the thought of picking up another book. And even though I don't ever have all the reading done, I still look forward to picking up my English homework...

I love the classics. There's something so beautiful about certain ideas fittings snugly together on a page. I love the way language can be so different, can take on so many different meanings, can make you suffer until you're in love. Like, The Brothers Karamazov. When Dmitri is standing at the window pane, his forehead sweating with a mixture of intense hatred for the one he loves....After that scene your life becomes real. It starts to finally mean something. Or in Mrs. Dalloway, when poor Clarissa is being accosted by Peter Walsh because she loves the little things in life, yet how to explain it to someone whose intelligence and taste for the finer things has overpowered him and made him almost too wise for his own good? In these moments, one dies and is reborn.

I'm known at Wake Forest as: the library.
People come to my room to look for books they might need for class; they come if they think I might have something good for a vacation read. My peers like me because I'm fun--I don't hole away in my room and study until my brains come out of my ears. I'm not socially awkward; I don't mind talking to strangers, I don't care if a boy looks me straight in the eyes. I laugh a lot. I don't make up my likes and dislikes. You know from the moment you meet me, I am the library. My roommate, who is a bookish type, gets uncomfortable when strangers come round looking for me. I try to introduce her to friends and guys--she always looks at her feet or towards her computer screen.
Sometimes, I sigh.
Once, I read her a passage out of Mrs. Dalloway:

"But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its compacitites, seemed nothing-nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown..."

She looked at me for a minute. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" I asked, leaning back in my bed.
"You're such a dork."
I was disappointed. I had given her an opportunity to open up--but she refused to take it.
If only she had said something like, "I didn't care for it, how can one be nothing?" I would have been overjoyed. She's afraid to be herself, or to even admit that in the darkness of the room, when she thinks no one is watching, she picks up one of my Harry Potter books and starts to read.
*************

"She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day."