“I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.”

“My wife loves written words ... you know, words that stick to parchment and paper like dead flies, and it seems my father felt the same - but I want to hear words! Remember that when you are looking for the right words: You must ask yourself what they SOUND like! Glowing with passion, dark with sorrow, sweet with love, that's what I want. - Cosimo”

“Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.”

“Sometimes it's a good thing we don't remember things half as well as books do.”

“Elinor had read countless stories in which the main characters fell sick at some point because they were so unhappy. She had always thought that a very romantic idea, but she’d dismissed it as a pure invention of the world of books. All those wilting heroes and heroines who suddenly gave up the ghost just because of unrequited love or longing for something they’d lost! Elinor had always enjoyed their sufferings—as a reader will. After all, that was what you wanted from books: great emotions you’d never felt yourself, pain you could leave behind by closing the book if it got too bad. Death and destruction felt deliciously real conjured up with the right words, and you could leave them behind between the pages as you pleased, at no cost or risk to yourself.”

“Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.”

“I pledge to set out to live a thousand lives between printed pages.I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal.I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world.I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day.I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close.”