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

This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment.

We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. 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. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because

Donna grew up with her parents arguing almost continually, and had consequently believed marriage was something that was not only inevitable, but also inevitably miserable.

you can choose choices but not outcomes.

It is the ability to stick to a task when your body and mind are at their limit, the ability to keep your head down, swimming in your lane, without looking around, worrying who might overtake you .

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

I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.

Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.

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.