Dannii Elle’s Reviews > The Ten Thousand Doors of January > Status Update

"They always end up alone in the stories - witches, I mean - living in the woods or mountains or locked in towers. I suppose it would take a brave man to love a witch, and men are mostly cowards."

"People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers."

"He fell asleep worrying vaguely that he'd developed some sort of murmur in his heart.

The following morning he recognized it as something much more serious: the discovery of his life's purpose."

"It's easy to hate people in books. I'm a reader, too, and I know how characters can turn into Villains at the drop of an authorial hat (those capital Vs like dagger points or sharpened teeth). It just isn't like that in real life."

"It's a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you're brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.

I wasn't. Then."

"I happen to believe every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment, slantwise in the light of dusk."

"Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books - those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles - understand that page-riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book."

"When I was seven, I found a Door. There - look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing."