Every German child learns to speak English in school.

She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?

Down there the nights are bright and nobody believes in the Devil.

In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?

But after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story.

No prince had lived in those wretched hovels, no red-robed bishops, only farmers and laborers whose stories no one had written down, and now they were lost, buried under wild thyme and fast growing spurge.

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.