I jolt back to reality to find that the noisy and chaotic classroom has grown silent. I had not noticed the gradual calming of my fellow pupils, so engrossed was I in the story. I had dissolved into the magic that the words created, leaving behind a shell of myself, elbows on the desk, head resting in hands. My senses had completely and utterly closed down and all that remained alive was my imagination, my inside eye reeling through landscapes and scenes; I had breathed not the stuffy classroom air but the same air as the characters, feeling their thoughts, not thinking my own. And then bang! I'm back. Where I remember noise there is now only silence. The book ended. My friend sniffs, pages turn, the teacher dozes...
I think that's where my belief in the power of words originated, that classroom in the 1980's. A good writer can remove the reader from his world, and then return him. A little changed.