“There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos. ”

“A library was nothing without its people. You say library and there’s this iconoclastic image of an old-lady librarian telling people to be quiet and not to run. But the thing was, that lady—that iconoclastic lady—was with us when we cleaned. She wore blue jeans, too. Maybe she was what people thought about when you said library, but she didn’t make the library. People made the library. That’s what made a library. Without them, all the sacredness was gone. It was just a building with books.”

“The library—the place in my life that was full of books—beagan to teach me that books weren't everything.”

“We're close. I can smell their faint scent," Blake whispered.Kieran snorted. "That makes one of us. All I smell is dog shit.”

“If peace had a smell,it would be the smell of a library full of old, leather-bound books.”

“Plenty of patrons had asked me strange things, but this was the first who asked me where my car was parked. It was almost comical to look at the man, because he actually thought I was going to tell him. I struggled to come up with a reply, but the best I could muster was, "That's personal." What I meant to say was, "Sir, the fact that I work in a public library doesn't make me stupid, it just makes me poor. There's no way I'm going to tell you—a psychotic person who could very well have a knife in his pocket—where I have parked my car.”

“There is something about libraries, old libraries, that makes them seem almost sacred. There's a smell of paper and must and binding stuff. It's like all the books are fighting against decay, against turning into dust, and at the same time fighting for attention.”