“I was a stranger and you took me in.-Joji G. Shoji, d. 1921”

“I'm a stranger," pointed out Bod."You're not," she said, definitely. "You're a little boy." And then she said, "And you're my friend. So you can't be a stranger.”

“Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?”

“You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time."Thank you. Do you want something?”

“Let us begin this letter, this prelude to an encounter, formally, as a declaration, in the old-fashioned way: I love you. You do not know me (although you have seen me, smiled at me). I know you (although not so well as I would like. I want to be there when your eyes flutter open in the morning, and you see me, and you smile. Surely this would be paradise enough?). So I do declare myself to you now, with pen set to paper. I declare it again: I love you.”

“I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.”

“They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance.”