“a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a cary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control.”

“Reading, she tells me, is what she does best. She loves it because it uses the whole of her, the right and the left, the hemispheres of reason and imagination. She discovered as a child that a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a cary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control.”

“You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”

“Writing is about making choices, Miss Dovecott says. One word or phrase or title over another. So many options that they're almost overwhelming. Which is why it is sometimes so easy to grab the cliché, to reach out to what is familiar. But don't. Because metaphor is all about the comparison of two unfamiliar, unlike things.”

“Read to your heart’s content. Though if you are a reader, the heart is never content.”

“Even English-teacher bookworms need friends and bars.”

“Do you have any idea how hard a story is to write? My brain is jumpy, and my heart doesn't know where to live. Is Male is such an imperfect narrator, but he will try to finish his tale.”