“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft were written by men.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

All your questions can be answered if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.

Adventures are all very well in their place, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.

I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Not only are there no happy endings,’ she told him, ‘there aren’t even any endings.

I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

Too many of us are taking our dreams to our graves. Songs that were never sung. Poems never written. Businesses never started. Relationships never formed. Books never written. Dreams never lived.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.