There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.

The night swallowed him up like a thieving fox.

I live in Hamburg; that's in the north. And I live on the outskirts of town. It looks like countryside.

Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. Peace. Was that the word?

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.

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.

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