Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

Nobody loves only once.

Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.

I love to read aloud.

Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth...all those glorious words.