“... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.”

“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”

“My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust.”

“True love, it's like an illness. I never understood it before. In books and plays. Poems. I never understood what drove otherwise intelligent, right-thinking people to do such extravagant, irrational things. Now I do. It's an illness. You can catch it when you least expect. There's no known cure. And sometimes, in its most extreme, it's fatal.”

“Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.”

“I've heard it said that children born to stressful times never shake the air of woe . . . .”

“I am beginning to feel at home in the past and a visitor to this strange and blanched experience we agree to call the present”