"He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did."
"Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one's soul so entangled in it that you can't let it go, even if you try. If you feel it--if you really feel it--then you speak it like it's a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there's blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can't let go."
"Don't look at me like that," said Ruza."Like what?""Like I'm a beautiful book you're about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes."
"...but one can't be irredeemable who shows reverence for books."
"As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard."
"On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream."
"He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about."
"It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him."
"Even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself."
"Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could... countervail each other?"
"It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming."
"If you're afraid of your own dreams, you're welcome here in mine."
"I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar."
"He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all."
"What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?"
"He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all."
"It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented."
"The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around...."
"You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."“Beautiful and full of monsters?"“All the best stories are."
"And that's how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can."
"Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light."
"What's the point of being old if you can't beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom?And what's the point of being young if you can't ignore all advice?"
"I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story."
"He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant."
"She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it."