“That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town Auditions was proof of our dull reliability. The play’s director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother’s friend and State Farm agent. ...Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town. We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

“My Grandma Nene always said that early was on time, on time was late, and late was unacceptable. Fatty was unacceptably late again."

“One evening, during that painful time, Samuel announced to Anita and Leticia that he had something important to tell them. ....He told the woman and the girl about his traumatic childhood, about losing his family and being exiled to a strange and hostile place, about being an orphan, always lonely, always in fear, until Luke and Lidia Evans came into his life, bringing him comfort and love. ...Finally, he opened his violin case, pulled out his medal, and placed in in Anita’s hand.”

“The Grand Staircase. In the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, below the Arms and Armor wing and outside the guards’ Dispatch Office, there are stacks of empty art crates. The crates come in all shapes and sizes... fit to ship rare treasures. On the morning of my first day in uniform I stand beside these sturdy, romantic things, wondering what my own role in the museum will feel like.”

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks is a novel based on the fact of an ancient copy of the Haggadah, a Jewish text that lays out the order of the Passover Seder. This is an extremely precious, illuminated manuscript originally from medieval Spain.

“At the heart of this vibrant saga is an old slave ship the Ibis. It’s destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its purpose to fight in China’s vicious nineteenth-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.”

“The letter arrives on a Friday. Slit ad resealed with a sticker, of course, as all their letters are: Inspected for your safety-PACT...No return address, only a New York, NY postmark, six days old. On the outside, his name - Bird- and because of this he knows it is from his mother.”

“Emma. For the past five months, I have watched the world die. Glaciers have advanced across Canada and England and Russia and Scandinavia, trampling everything in their path. They show no signs of stopping. The data says they won’t. Within three months, ice will cover the Earth, and life as we know it will end. My job is to find out why. And to stop it.”

“I didn’t spend a year building a wooden flatboat and then sailing it two thousand miles down the Mississippi River simply because I was suffering from a Huck Finn complex, although that certainly played a part....I hungered to see that river country when I stumbled across an account of one of the first boatmen who braved the water route that America followed toward prosperity and greatness.”

“My mind replays her screams as the orderlies drag her from the ambulance, an otherworldly mix of falcon and banshee interspersed with strangled pleas: Nonono don’t touch me and I will kill myself and - most chillingly of all: They are coming! Do you hear me? They are coming!"