“People tend to find books when they are ready for them.”

“He reached out to stroke the spines of the books, as if they might whisper their secrets to him if he touched them. But the books remained silent, as all good books tend to do when touched by people to whom they don't belong.”

“And people tended not to bother a woman with a book.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...”

“The Lord tends to come at the moment of great alarm, when we're 'ready to sink into despair.”

“People who read books," he went on, "tend to be dispensable. Extremely.”