“The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of other people's houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else.”

“A town without a bookshop is a town without a soul.”

“She could remember feeling that disorienting first rush of love, as bright and light as if no one else had ever felt it, as if you were looking down into the ultimate pool of emotional revelation. She also remembered how stupid it made you.”

“Don't worry about what you did yesterday, he said, often, worry about what you haven't done today.”

“All i care about is giving you the happy ever after you want. In our own messy, complicated way.”

“Nice people sometimes do terrible things because they don't want to do one small mean thing. It doesn't automatically make them a bad person forever.”

“My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.”