“A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us.”

“We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”

“What I do is based on powers we all have inside us; the ability to endure; the ability to love, to carry on, to make the best of what we have — and you don’t have to be a ‘Superman’ to do it.”

“It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.”

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”

“One must always be careful of books," said Tessa, "and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”

“We are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.”

“For we carry our fate with us — and it carries us.”

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

“A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.”