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.

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

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.

Many [book] even lay flat in the floor open. Their spines upward. Elinor couldn't bear to look! Didn't the monster know that was the way to break a book's neck?

They're all cruel,' he said. 'The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe the people don't see the cruelty in your world right away, it's better hidden, but it's there all the same.

My children were all made from paper and printer's ink.