It's a terrible thing, isn't it, the way we throw people away?

She either confused me with a much older child or else she glimpsed deep inside my soul and perceived a hole that needed filling. I've always chosen to believe the latter. After all, it's the librarian's one sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

Nell was not one for friends and had never hidden her distaste for most other humans, their neurotic compulsion for the acquisition of allies.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.