I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

Not only are there no happy endings,' she told him, 'there aren't even any endings.

It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.

They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.

You know that I love you." And despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true. The other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.

When you love something you just don't want to stop talking about it.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.