“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

“Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.”

“When you read you can have every adventure. In the pages of a book you can be anyone you ever dreamed of being... They can never tell you you're too young to slay the dragon -- because it all happens right here, where it's safe.”

“Things here are so different. Poisoned rivers, softened stone. You never know exactly what you're getting into. What will hold and what will give way”

“Logically, if you grow up here and you are open minded, you go to college and never come back. If you like it here, which means that you are happy living in the same house, with the same people and ideas as the generation before, then you stay. If you stay, you marry someone just like you. It's like inbreeding.”

“I've been exactly that lonly. You're not connected to anything. Some nights it feels like you're dying by the hour. You're so desperate you can't even attract the kind of person you once swore you'd never settle for.”