A Quote by Sabaa Tahir
I felt like an outcast and turned to books, fantasy in particular, to find a place for myself. Reading took me away from this world, which I needed.
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The way I felt growing up, which was like an outcast - I was weird, I was a nerd, I read fantasy books - I think a lot of fantasy book readers and a lot of readers and writers in general have that experience of isolation.
When I was growing up, I didn't feel strong. I felt weak. I felt like a scared little kid. So I naturally turned to books to deal with that feeling, and I really turned to fantasy. That's really what influenced my decision to write a fantasy novel.
I grew up feeling voiceless and powerless as a kid. I turned to books - fantasy books in particular - to give me comfort. As I grew up, I realized I could find that sense of power and voice if I simply started writing.
I read books when I was a kid, lots of books. Books always seemed like magic to me. They took you to the most amazing places. When I got older, I realized that I couldn't find books that took me to all of the places I wanted to go. To go to those places, I had to write some books myself.
I definitely always took my problems and turned them into music, and the more I can make myself feel happy, the better. But yeah, I definitely feel like music was always a place for me to, like, escape to. I just love songs that are fantasy.
I'm an anxious person in general, but something about being pregnant and awaiting the release of my first book, The Monsters Of Templeton, made me into an insane anxious person. I didn't sleep at night. I ended up sleeping all day. In a strange way I felt like the world was going to end. I found myself so deeply depressed at times that I started to read about happiness, and that took me into books about idealism and utopianism. Reading books about people who tried to build utopian societies of different kinds gave me a kind of lift.
But, in the end, the books that surround me are the books that made me, through my reading (and misreading) of them; they fall in piles on my desk, they stack behind me on my shelves, they surprise me every time I look for one and find ten more I had forgotten about. I love their covers, their weight and their substance. And like the child I was, with the key to the world that reading gave me, it is still exciting for me to find a new book, open it at the first page and plunge in, head first, heart deep.
When I was doing those things with the Berlin circus, playing the accordion, going to North Korea - I felt all those things were just me experimenting and letting myself go. Everything before seems like a constant searching. Now that I think about it, I feel so lucky that happened; that I didn't find my voice straight away, that I didn't find my passion straight away, that it took so long.
I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.
Honestly, I just needed some guidance my rookie year. I needed to know what to wear, and where to find stuff. It took me like three years to find jeans that fit me!
I had been doing theater since I was a kid, so the stage really felt like home to me. It felt like the place where I trust myself the most in the world and felt the most confident.
When I read these books, I no longer felt like I was confined to a very tiny world. I no longer felt housebound and bedbound. Really, I told myself, I was just brainbound. And this was not such a sorry state of affairs. My brain, with a little help from other people's brains, could take me to some pretty interesting places, and create all kinds of wonderful things. Despite its faults, my brain, I decided, was not the worst place in the world to be.
People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.
Someday you'll find the place It's the place where love takes over hate Then you'll see all the things you do Affect everyone around you Then you'll see there's no fear at all You held my hand, we took down that wall As I looked at you with nothing to say Now I understand why you pushed me away I looked far and now I see That the only one I needed was me
I literally feel like books saved my life. I found these people. Me reading Camus and Kafka, all of the tortured teenager stuff of someone who's falling in love with books. These people, these writers had the questions. They may not have had the answers, but they're not afraid to look at the questions head on. It was just life-changing for me. Yeah, books, honestly, I can't even tell you. I feel saved by books; I feel like they let me be who I was and find the world I wanted to be in.
It was Sci-Fi and fantasy that got me reading, and Sci-Fi writers in particular have pack rat minds. They introduce all sorts of interesting themes and ideas into their books, and so for me it was a short leap to go from the fantasy and Sci-Fi genres to folklore, mythology, ancient history and philosophy. I did not read philosophy because I set out to become a philosopher; I read it because it looked interesting.
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