Why could she remember nothing but stories of frightened people when Capricorn looked at her? She usually found it so easy to escape somewhere else, to get right inside the minds of people and animals who existed only on paper, so why not now? Because she was afraid. "Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.

Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.

My dear Elinor, you were obviously born into the wrong story,” said Dustfinger at last.

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.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

perhaps because this time not fear but love made him read.

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