“Those afternoons in the library, breathing the stale sun-warmed dust of a thousand stories (accented by the collective mildew of a hundred years of rising damp), had been enchanted.”

“The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.”

“And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understand somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.”

“Loneliness had made the Queen bitter, bitterness had made her selfish, and selfishness had made her suspicious. --The Changeling”

“Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.”

“it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.”

“Tragedy has been described as 'the conflict between desire and possibility.' Following this definition, is The Forgotten Garden a tragedy? If so, in what way/s?”

“Nell was like a witch. Her long silvery hair rolled into a bun on the back of her head, the narrow wooden house on the hillside in Paddington, with its peeling lemon-yellow paint and overgrown garden, the neighborhood cats that followed her everywhere. The way she had of fixing her eyes so straight on you, as if she might be about to cast a spell.”

“Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history].”

“That, my dear, is what makes a character interesting, their secrets.”

“I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained twiddling my thumbs until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes, you can tell just by looking at a door there’s something interesting behind it.”