“Remember, a book is always a gift.”

“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.”

“Books aren't lumps of paper, but minds on shelves.”

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

“They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.”

“...to be free is often to be lonely”