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

Was this what fame was like? Like a permanent bittersweet cocktail of worship and assault?

As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’

sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.’

The ash in the soil.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Going for a coffee with Ash might have led, for instance, to Nora falling in love with the person serving the coffee. That was simply the unpredictable nature of quantum physics.

most of what we’d feel in any life is still available.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

Nora remembered what it was to care and be cared for.