A Northern Light

“But eating was the last thing on my mind. And I didn't see how Miss Wilcox could eat, or teach, or sleep or ever find any reason to leave this room. Not with all these books in it, just begg...”

“Well, it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths... The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting wha...”

“I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.”

“I think your vision gets better as you get older.”

“And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to t...”

“You can't argue with the dead, no matter what you say, they always have the last word.”

“As I nodded and smiled and umm-hmm'd and oh, my'd my way down the drive, I wondered if boys had any sort of magazine that told them how to attract women and, if so, did it ever tell them to...”

“A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.”

“French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer...”

“I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.”

“What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and...”