He made the boxes because he was lonely. He didn't have anyone to love, and he made the boxes so he could love them, and so people would know that he existed, and because birds are free and the boxes are hiding places for the birds so they will feel safe, and he wanted to be free and be safe. The boxes are for him so he can be a bird.

I have a sort of Christmas-morning sense of the library as a big box full of beautiful books.

There was only the cemetery itself, spread out in the moonlight like a soft grey hallucination, a stony wilderness of Victorian melancholy.

That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living. In a few minutes we’ll be worrying about names for the children.

He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.

Is it sad to fancy David Tennant when you're dead?

Now I wonder if it means that the future is a place, or like a place, that I could go to; that is go to in some way other than just getting older.