Laura Miller

“We have but one dance to a lifetime of songs.”

“I believe that there is a perfect someone for everyone, and I know that you still believe that too. There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn’t all that perfect,” he added.”

“Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight – the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities. My reality was that I was, is and will always be madly and hopelessly in love with you. You are my love of loves, my dream of dreams, my hope of hopes, and I would take the journey all over again because it led me to you, because it’s our story – the story of us. As for the war, I surrendered.”

“You are my love of loves, my dream of dreams, my hope of hopes, and I would take the journey all over again because it led me to you, because it’s our story – the story of us.”

“The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with...”

“because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly”

“Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.”

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.”

“If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.”

“If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.”

“A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there.”

“Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked.”

“The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.”

“Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?”