MJ (minnowslibrary)

“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. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful, who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi