Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.

A thousand enemies outside the house are better than one within. Arab proverb

Ten minutes can be a long time when you're waiting with a beating heart for something you don't understand, something you don't really want to know.

What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.

So it's happened, I kept thinking, you're in the middle of a story exactly as you've always wanted, and it's horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you're not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn't half as much fun as I'd expected.

Sometimes, when you're so sad you don't know what to do, it helps to be angry.