“Tell me about yourself, Miss Russel."I started to give him the obligatory response, first the demurral and then the reluctant flat autobiography, but some slight air of polite inattention in his ma...”

“I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.”

“XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense.”

“You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.”

“No matter what gifts you have, practice is the only way to get better at anything."If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery it would not seem so wonderful at all - Michael Angelo”

“You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle”

“Time is a precious gift.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“Every great love starts with a great story...”

“I knew, in the silence that followed, that anything could happen here. It might be too late: again, I might have missed my chance. But I would at least know I tried, that I took my heart and extend...”

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”