“They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?”

“What is the Truth? It is that ugly thing so many want buried hidden away from our loved ones hidden away from the world yet is powerful enough to raise its head and break through the chains of denial we build to hold it in place.”

“I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.”

“The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.”

“The only thing we'll get from trying to figure out where another path would have taken us are questions there are no answers to and heartbreak that can't be healed. Regardless of how we got there, all any of us can do is move forward from where we are.”

“The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become”

“Looking at the past can be painful, but you can either run from it, numb it, or you can learn from it.”