"But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."
"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."
"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die . . . It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."
"I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense."
"Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us."