“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.”

“Ever since Eliza had discovered the book of fairy tales . . . had disappeared inside its faded pages, she'd understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.”

“You'll beat this. I know it doesn't feel like it, but you will. You're a survivor.""I don't want to survive it.""I know that, too," Nell had said. "And it's fair enough. But sometimes we don't have a choice...”

“After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.”

“I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.”

“It's a funny thing, character, the way it brands people as they age, rising from within to leave its scar.”

“It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?”