“He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”

“Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked."Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”

“He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.”

“I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page.”

“Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page.”

“The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.”