“To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.”

“Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.”

“I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these things, I saw the world going through these things, and I needed to understand them. I needed to make sense of them. Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books, and it was books that showed me there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Senor Sempere believed that God lives, to a smaller or greater extent, in books, and that is why he devoted his life to sharing them, to protecting them, and to making sure their pages, like our memories and our desires, are never lost.”

“You can leave a door open for your 'friends,' but the truth is anybody can come in through that open door. And how do you know these friends are who they say they are, anyway?”

“Show me how to lactate, and I’ll be the best mother a father could be.”