Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he's a friendless sixth-grader.

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf.

There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care. All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.

Some of them are working very hard indeed. “What are they doing?” “My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious. “They are reading!

Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.