The Invisible Hour

A book doesn't live when it's written. It lives when it's read.

Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It’s all preposterous. That’s why we have novels. To make sense of things.

In every fairy tale the girl who is saved is the one who rescues herself.

once a girl walked into a library she could never be controlled again.

What do you have there?” he asked, always interested to discover what a person was reading, for he believed it was possible to see inside a person’s soul once you knew which books mattered to them.

Some people are who you think they are. Some people hide the wolf inside of them, but you can hear them howl.

Sometimes walking away is the bravest thing you can do.

In a place where books were banned there coud be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.

In books, no one helped a girl who didn't help herself and every fairy tale ended with the same lessons. Trick your enemy, do what you must, believe in enchantments, save yourself.

Life can be long or short, it is impossible to know, but every once in a while an entire life is spent in one night, the night when the windows are open and you can hear the last of the crickets’ call, when there is a chill in the air and the stars are bright, when nothing else matters, when a single kiss lasts longer than a lifetime, when you do not think about the future or the past, or whether or not you are walking through a dream rather than the real world, when everything you have always wanted and everything you are fated to mourn forever are tied together with black thread and then sewn with your own hand, when in the morning, as you wake and see the mountain in the distance, you will understand that whether or not you’ve made a mistake, whether or not you will lose all that you have, this is what it means to be human.

Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around.

Herein are a thousand different doors, and a thousand different lives. Turn the page and you open the door.

IT WASN’T EASY TO walk away from the past, even when you locked it up in a box for which there was no key. Memories rattle around late at night, they claw at the latch, escaping when you least expect them to do so.

He truly wished that for the next thousand years all government could be in the hands of women, for men had made such a mess of the world,

They thought I only had a life that I lived here, but I had found other possibilities every time I read a book.

Evil was predictable; it cloaked itself in righteousness, convinced its enemies must be punished.

To my mother. Now I know the love between us was never invisible, even when I didn't see it. I see it now.

Love in the real world must exist, otherwise why would it be written about so often?

She understood that when a book spoke to you, you wanted to speak back.

Instead, she told herself that each day must be a garden in which she grew whatever was possible given the season.

Self-pity from a man was something she could not abide, not when she had a woman’s issues to deal with. It was time for him to consider his good fortune and privilege.

Open the door, open the page, and there you are. You hold the fern-seed, and invisible you can slip into a thousand volumes.

In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future.

You had to lose something to gain something. It was the reason why so many people stayed, long after they knew they should leave.

He knew that all things begin with kindness and that all hope began with trust.

Trick your enemy, do what you must, believe in enchantments, save yourself.

To Mia, If it was a dream, it was ours alone and you were mine.

You had to search west of the moon and east of the sun if you wanted to find your true love.

Her life was in her own hands, to do with as she pleased, the one thing that belonged to her, the only thing she could claim for herself.

In his opinion, a woman who loved books was the best sort.