A bolt from the blue.

The thing you hope will never happen to you might just happen to someone else instead, who has been spending their life dreading the thing that will happen to you.

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.

There was something I was always very good at, however, and that was teaching myself not to be frightened while frightening things are going on. It is difficult to do this, but I had learned. It is simply a matter of putting one’s fear aside, like the vegetable on the plate you don’t want to touch until all of your rice and chicken are gone, and getting frightened later, when one is out of danger. Sometimes I imagine I will be frightened for the rest of my life because of all of the fear I put aside during my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea.

We weren't friends[...]We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us part of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can't quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we can't solve it alone.

There are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers.