“But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.”

“She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.”

“And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.”

“She felt as if she'd always been holding a part of herself back, saving it, and she had a terrible fear she would end up saving it forever. That she would die with whole parts of herself unused.”

“Joss's ears perked up. He loved libraries. Nowhere else in the world felt so safe and homey. Nowhere else smelled like books and dust and happy solitude quite like a library did.”

“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.”