One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued "Jane Eyre" over the anonymous stranger...Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.