“That was the trouble with moving houses; no matter how carefully you packed the books, they never ended up on the new shelves in quite the right place.”

“You can leave a place, you can leave a situation. You can quit a job, move to a different house, forget a thing that has happened, or even give up on a love. But the one thing you can never walk away from is yourself.”

“Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.”

“An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.”

“It was only later, in her new, darker rooms above the banking house, that she realized it didn’t matter how loud she screamed or how violently she wept. Her parents would never come to her because, being dead, they didn’t care anymore.”

“If you ask me, it doesn't matter what life you're living, life never has a solution. No matter how hard the struggles are that you leave behind, new struggles always take their place.”