"If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so."

"I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began."

"[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."

"It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home."

"That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect."