If you keep pretending you're in that book, it will make you not want to live in the life you're in.

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help. Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you? Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing. Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.

Don't let it worry you, not being able to speak,'Dustfinger had often told her. 'People tend not to listen anyway, right?

believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things. Clive Barker, Abarat

The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.

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

I pledge to set out to live a thousand lives between printed pages. I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal. I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world. I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day. I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close.