“So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over that wall for the rest of the night.”

“Words,words filled the night like the fragrance of invisible flowers.”

“She felt as if the grave stones were whispering those names to her as she walked past... Those stones that bore no names seemed like closed mouths, sad mouths that forgotten how to speak. But perhaps the dead didn't mind what their names had once been?”

“I will try to write books until I drop dead.”

“Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?”

“If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.”

“I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.”

“Children, they're the same everywhere. Greedy little creatures but the best listeners in the world -any world. The very best of all.”

“Courage was something John Reckless only ever wished he had. Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths, and John had always picked the easy ones.”

“Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.”

“Killing is easy," said Mo, "Dying is harder...”