Books, Sonia had decided, were what she would live with when she finally left this place. She would work in a library – any library, anywhere. She’d sweep the floors if she had to. But she’d work in a library, and she’d read the books every day for the rest of her life.

This was Roberta’s favorite time. The quiet, the chill of the leftover night air, the cold seeping into her legs and her feet, waking her up. The trees around the edges of the pitch were black against the sky, and from one of them three ravens took flight, rising stark and lonely against the clouds.

That was what the books did – they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn’t have your own.

It was the girls who locked themselves away, who had never felt the loving touch of a man, who, when they loved, loved the fiercest.

I was doomed to it. For there was no way to convince him that, with all his scars, the terrible truth was that he was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

It was infuriating how many people got things wrong about you when you were a teenage girl, but as she had learned to do, Katie took her anger and made it into something else.

For a shy girl unused to men, it is easier to hurl the moon from the sky than it is to turn away from a man who truly wishes to pursue her.

You suspected me of murder?” I said. “I suspect everyone of murder,” he replied.

There are large moments in life; but sometimes it is the small moments – the casual moments – that change everything. The second’s absent wandering of attention before an accident. The choice to take one road, instead of another.

Sonia envied her, the way she could turn her brain off, think about absolutely nothing. It was a trick Sonia herself had never learned. That was what books did – they turned off your thinking for you, put their thoughts in your head so you wouldn’t have your own.