Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.

If you don't stop apologizing, you're going to convince me you've done something wrong.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

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.

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.