“...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.”

“Sylvia Plath is an example of the egotistical sublime: her subject is herself, her predicament, her violent Romantic emotions,” wrote the poet Craig Raine.”

“Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.”

“Men, women, and children she had never seen before and whom she had been schooled to think of as enemies were cheering her as though she were one of their own. She could make out only a little of what they said but she knew they were encouraging and welcoming her. Tightness welled up in her throat. She looked from the crowd to her husband, who was gazing back at her with genuine pride in his eyes. Without thought, she reached out a hand across the space that separated them. He took it and raised it to his lips.The cheers rose to heaven.For the first time in her life, Rycca felt what it was to come home.”

“Once in while a man or a woman--no, they were not men and women; they were Jews--would find Liesel's face among the crowd. They would meet her with their defeat, and the book thief could do nothing but watch them back in a long, incurable moment before they were gone again. She could only hope they could read the depth of sorrow in her face, to recognize that it was true, and not fleeting.She understood she was utterly worthless to these people. They could not be saved.Then, one human. Hans Hubermann.”

“Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose," she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, here--the sonnet.But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He was smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for being asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking, Go on reading. You don't look sad now, he thought. And he wondered what she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if that were possible, to increase.”