"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."
"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."
"Are you happy?"
"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."
"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."
"The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school."