Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.

Future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.

He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.