The Midnight Train

Books,’ she once said, ‘are mirrors for the soul. So if you catch a glimpse of someone’s soul, you will know the mirror for them.

He read because stories gave him room to grow beyond the world he was given. They helped him feel as if the lives he read about intertwined with his own, like threads in an ever-expanding rope. Stories made him strong.

He felt whole with her, like a question that had found its answer.

Music had a way of threading through decades like nothing else. A song

just hate that when you lose someone when you’re young you’re going to have to spend more time missing them than with them.

He just wanted to live inside a moment of that life with her forever, to pluck it like a flower and press it in a book, and just stay on that page until the end of time.

I think everyone you meet you end up losing in some way, but if you love someone they don’t really leave. Obviously they do. But not entirely. They live in your mind. You keep them alive. You can lose everything but you can’t lose love.

There were days in life that rolled by and were never really thought of again. And then there were days that were so beloved or important that they contained inside them everything that came after. Russian doll days, that were always inside the expanding future.

A life of avoiding pain becomes a life defined by pain. Pain and regret.

I don’t know where the past hides, but I will meet you there.

It feels wrong that I am the one making the choice, because that isn’t what it feels like to me. It feels like I chose you, and kept choosing you, but over the decades you stopped choosing me.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

The incredibly annoying thing about being dead was that you got all your priorities in order, just when it was too late to do anything about them.

And as the Ghost watched his own hurt, he understood himself in a way he’d never quite managed in life. He saw how much he’d been shaped and conducted by his youth. The striving for a success he thought he needed to justify his existence. And the struggle with a love he didn’t think he deserved.

The joy of selling books. The joy of joining the right book to the right reader.

That was his skill. Like a travel agent of the imagination.

I don't know where the past hides, but I will meet you there.

But what if there are things that I did wrong? Agnes's face abruptly softened. A smile emerged, accompanied by a tender laugh. "That, Old Bean, means you have lived.

Sometimes everything you need isn’t so far from where you start.

He had made their love into a blanket and burrowed deep under it.

It is ironic," he told him, "that it only takes a moment to die but a whole lifetime to learn how to live...

That's what Mrs. Bray says. The dark shade all around the face in the background makes it more... magical. And I like the idea. About how you need the dark sometimes to make the other things brighter.

... Thing is, Wilbur, this world is full of folk who look but never see. I am looked at a hundred times a day. But not many see. Thanks for seeing, lad. Keep that, lad. Stay seeing...

The past had its own gravity. It couldn’t be escaped.

The problem was this. Everything that was once so slow in life was now so fast. Time shortened but the power of it all had strengthened in potency.

Success is just the distance you travel from where you started. And you traveled far. You did well for yourself.

the education system reinforces the class system. So every time someone from nothing and nowhere gets in

Indeed, he didn’t have much to say at all. He guarded his words as if they were money that would be spent once spoken.

Even the most reckless action was a consequence of what had gone before, just as every loud mistake in the world was the product of some quiet and secret pain.