“Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.”

“There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly... It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate.”

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”

“The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.”

“If anyone else asked that question, O He Who Is Terrible and Great, I would have said they were an ignorant fool; in you it is a sign of the disarming simplicity which is the fount of all virtue.”

“He said there are thousands of Shadowhunters, but great love comes once in a lifetime if one is lucky, and one would be a fool to let it go.”