I don't like to eat the same dish every day, so I read very different things.

Fire and water," he said, "don't really mix. You could say they're incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.

Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.

A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.

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

Didn't books say that too: that there is always price to pay for happiness?

The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.