Quotes from book

The Thirteenth Tale

“There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Tragedy alters everything.”

“All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”

“For it must be very lonely being dead.”

“For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.”

“Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.”

“But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.”

“Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.”

“A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.”

“A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.”

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.”

“The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world.”

“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”

“What better place to kill time than a library?”

“Reading can be dangerous.”

“Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.”

“Life is compost.”

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”