“Yet I had such joy from the words.”

“I wish we had left things undisturbed, exactly as they were and beneath whatever layers of silt had come to cover them, and yet I feel joy to be here.”

“She had thought often of Ada's words about inventing new endings to stories and choosing joy over sorrow. In recent years she had decided her sister had been in part wrong. Suffering and death and loss were inescapable. And yet, what Ada had written about joy was entirely true. When she stands before you with her long, naked limbs and her mysterious smile, you must embrace her while you can.”

“His voice had this thick, Charleston accent, where every word had more syllables than ever intended, yet each word seemed as if it had been carefully chosen and presented in a way that only a man born and raised in the heart of the South could–distinguished and from a different time.”

“Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.”

“the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.”