Justine Picardie

“People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them?”

“As if you can measure literary excellence with precise instruments; as if there were a science of writing, governed by equations that reveal immutable truths.”

“... he said it felt like walking into another century, being there, looking up at the mullion windows, all darkened now, and the castellated towers that rose up out of the clutch of the ivy. "And you," he said, "you look like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, with your beautifully serious face and your grave, grey eyes. So do you have a suitably romantic story to tell?”

“And yes, I confess, when I looked at him, I thought of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester and Maxim de Winter... and how could I not, when I had been waiting for them to step out of the pages of the books I loved; when I knew them so well, read them inside out and into myself?”

“But I've wept so much,' she said to Delay. 'Now I don't cry any more. When you don't cry it's because you no longer believe in happiness.”

“Smiling is not a duty, but a freedom. It's up to you now; you are liberated from the expectations and conformities of youth.”