Quotes from Linda Grant

Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it.

I was the girl whose face fell when she saw a wrapped present in the shape of a box, perhaps a jigsaw puzzle. Worst of all, that preparation for the future slave-house of motherhood, a doll. I only wanted book tokens or books themselves – but better a book token. The worst present is the book you don't want to read.

Reading wasn't my religion – it was my oxygen.

When I look at my books I feel like Alice in the closing pages of Wonderland, when the cards all rise up and overwhelm her.

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was the literary equivalent of the Wonderbra for intellectually pretentious students of the seventies.

The idea that I was building a library to bequeath to the next generation is one of the greatest fallacies of my life. The next generation don't want old books – they don't seem to want books at all.

The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back.

Books are too personal as objects to be displayed, in case a potential buyer is put off by your taste for Nietzsche or Marian Keyes. You would not display the contents of your knicker and sock drawer, or your bathroom cabinet with its face creams and cough remedies, so why put off potential buyers with your taste in literature?

War was terrible and terrifying - blood, death, torture, blitz, camps. But if you watched the films they made, The Great Escape, The Bridge on the River Kwai, it seemed it was possible for war to be a chance for heroism and medal winning.

The books, as I have already said, are a library. In a library, you do not read a book to the last page and dispose of it: you return, you return. ... I return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.

Time either erodes us, or it silts us up. There is no cast iron shore.

Marriages last because the people in them want to be married

When I was young, boys invited in for sex would examine your bookshelves.

How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.