Inkspell

Meggie thought all those things, she thought them over and over again. And at the same time she knew, deep down inside her, that she had made up her mind long ago

Meggie said nothing. It was so quiet among the books, so terribly quiet among all those words

The idea hovered and shivered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.
Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

"He'll never find out." Dustfinger glanced surreptitiously at the other fire-eater. As far as he remembered, Sootbird could juggle burning torches well enough, but fire didn't dance for him

Dustfinger in a voice soft with longing: the fairies swarming above the grass, trees so high that you thought they would catch the clouds in their branches

"As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells… and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower… both strange and familiar."

"Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?"

"Stories never really end, Meggie," he had once told her, "even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page."

"Does anyone in the world bind books more beautifully than your father?" her fingers asked.
Meggie shook her head with a smile. "No," she whispered. "No one, in this world or any other."

after all, for years he had lost his wife to this world made of words and paper