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

I breathe slowly and deeply. I make my eyes still under eyelids, I make my mind still, and soon, Sleep, seeing a perfect reproduction of himself, comes to be united with his facsimile.

But you know: you know that if I could have stayed, if I could have gone on, that I would have clutched every second: whatever it was, this death, you know that it came and took me, like a child carried away by goblins.

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

we both smile and we are conspirators.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

The cure might be worse than the problem