“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.”

“The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.”

“In that book which is my memory,On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”

“No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun! Look, it is the first page! And it is a beautiful one!”

“I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.”

“Do we say, Oh now I'm going to be nice to the weak and the small? Or do we do as we learned when we were pages?”

“Many can argue that reality is as it is, but my experience is that the opposite is exactly true. Reality is ours for the making.”