"The world was hers for the reading."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
-- Margaret Lea"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale : A Novel)

""Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you"
Margaret Lea in The Thirteenth Tale"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"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."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"What better place to kill time than a library?"
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
— Abraham Lincoln

"My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."
— Abraham Lincoln

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus