"No one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night."

"I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing."

"There are times when the human face and body can express the yearning of the heart so accurately that you can, as they say, read them like a book. Do not abandon me."

"She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it."

"Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued "Jane Eyre" over the anonymous stranger...Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life."

"opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it."

"Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course."

"Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head."

"Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so."