My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.

Children don’t require of their parents a past and they find something faintly unbelievable, almost embarrassing, in parental claims to a prior existence.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

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

You make a life out of what you have, not what you're missing.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

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