The Midnight Library: The No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and worldwide phenomenon

you start off as coal and you end up as coal.

the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

Henry David Thoreau. All good things are wild and free.

‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’

Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology.

more precisely: she imagined she was grateful, because he was lovely, and there were so many moments of joy and laughter and love.

‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you

There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time.

We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like.