To Live or to Exist

Date a girl who reads.

"If you find a girl who reads, keep her close.  When you find her at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her.  You may lose her for a couple of hours, but she will always come back to you.  She'll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they are.  Date a girl who reads because you deserve it.  You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable.  If you can only give her monotony and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you're better off alone.  If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads."

So... I was going through all these inspiring and touching quotes I had seen and saved onto my phone and I came across this one by (surprisingly enough) Robert Pattinson.  It never fails to move me every time.

I read.  I live and breathe books.  I read and write and read some more, from cheesy romance novels that kill my brain cells like Endless Summer by Jennifer Echols to advanced and action-packed mysteries like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  It's my alternate universe, and the only real way to drag me out of it is to physically wave your hand in front of the pages as I absorb the words..  To me, books are an escape.

Not many people that I know nowadays understand that.  People my age simply do not enjoy reading the way I do.  No one thinks they have enough time to build and remember an alternate world in their minds, taken from the words on a page.  No one wants to sit there and dream something up for themselves when someone else has already done it for them on a television screen.  "Why would you read that stupid book if they made a movie out of it?"

However, you really can't replace that feeling you get when you read a good book.  You can't really replicate the smell of old pages like the ones in my copy of Sherlock Holmes (which I am pretty much absorbing, by the way.)  You can't have half the imagination I've built for myself through books if you waste your time in front of a backlit screen, watching moving pictures that tell a story for you.  There is absolutely no possible way you can replicate the attachment you get to the characters that have developed inside your own head, as opposed to the depictions of the characters you claim to know on your television.  Is seeing the last Harry Potter movie REALLY the same as reading the final book?  For me, I don't think the movies would have meant anything without the words that JK Rowling wrote, even with the amazing people who play it out on the big screen.

So, when Robert Pattinson sits around and tells the story of a girl with the world and the worlds beyond it, understand that he is telling the truth.  Girls like me, that read and are emotionally invested in the written word, are generally nerds and are written off as such by our peers.  We do as we are asked, paying attention in class and reading and occasionally writing down random song lyrics in the margins of our papers.  But we're so much more than that.  Inside our heads, there is a whole universe filled with epic wand battles and wars and love and hate and hope... and it's because we read.

IT'S BECAUSE WE READ.

So, boys... take note of this quote.  Comprehend what Robert Pattinson is saying when he talks about a girl with the mind of an avid reader.... and date a girl who reads.  You won't regret it.