The Midnight Train

Books,’ she once said, ‘are mirrors for the soul. So if you catch a glimpse of someone’s soul, you will know the mirror for them.

He read because stories gave him room to grow beyond the world he was given. They helped him feel as if the lives he read about intertwined with his own, like threads in an ever-expanding rope. Stories made him strong.

just hate that when you lose someone when you’re young you’re going to have to spend more time missing them than with them.

A life of avoiding pain becomes a life defined by pain. Pain and regret.

I think everyone you meet you end up losing in some way, but if you love someone they don’t really leave. Obviously they do. But not entirely. They live in yourmind. You keep them alive. You can lose everything but you can’t lose love.

I don’t know where the past hides, but I will meet you there.

The incredibly annoying thing about being dead was that you got all your priorities in order, just when it was too late to do anything about them.

Music had a way of threading through decades like nothing else. A song

There were days in life that rolled by and were never really thought of again. And then there were days that were so beloved or important that they contained inside them everything that came after. Russian doll days, that were always inside the expanding future.

He just wanted to live inside a moment of that life with her forever, to pluck it like a flower and press it in a book, and just stay on that page until the end of time.

But what if there are things that I did wrong?Agnes's face abruptly softened. A smile emerged, accompanied by a tender laugh. "That, Old Bean, means you have lived.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

He felt whole with her, like a question that had found its answer.

The forwardness of life was a problem, thought the Ghost.If days could be scattered all over, so on Monday you were forty and on Tuesday you were nine and on Wednesday you were eighty-one, that would be more helpful. You would know the fleeting nature of things, realise how many versions of ourselves a lifetime contained. It would make life’s beauty so abundantly clear. The way a sunset was so beguiling because it tells us that every day eventually sinks into night.

And to live life well you need to know when to ignore what is expected of you. Even if it means breaking the rules.

Music had a way of threading through decades like nothing else. A song, after all, was a needle pulling the thread of time, stitching disparate moments into something whole. It was bittersweet. The needle could hurt. And this piece had too many memories. Yet his life was what it was. He had the life he had.

The joy of selling books. The joy of joining the right book to the right reader.

It feels wrong that I am the one making the choice, because that isn’t what it feels like to me. It feels like I chose you, and kept choosing you, but over the decades you stopped choosing me.

And as the Ghost watched his own hurt, he understood himself in a way he’d never quite managed in life. He saw how much he’d been shaped and conducted by his youth. The striving for a success he thought he needed to justify his existence. And the struggle with a love he didn’t think he deserved.

No future? How does that work?""Well, time is made of events. Seasons. Ceremonies. Funerals. And nothing has happened in the future so it doesn't exist, and when it happens it will become sasa, which is the Swahili for 'present.' And then it will become zamani, the past. And that is what waits for us. Because one day we will be the past, but not the future. There is no future. Time travels backward. And it is always on top of itself. Which fits with a lot of what we know about physics. So anyway, what this means is that the past is ahead of us and not the future.

And then you would come across a day—or even a minute—and it would have a whole decade’s worth of weight. It would be everything. It would have the power to change an entire life.

Sometimes everything you need isn’t so far from where you start.

And I realized that if you aim to be something you are not, you will fail. So I had to be who I was. The only way to learn is to live, it’s as simple as that.

He had made their love into a blanket and burrowed deep under it.

The only way to learn is to live,

It is ironic," he told him, "that it only takes a moment to die but a whole lifetime to learn how to live...

I don't know where the past hides, but I will meet you there.

In knowing Charlie it became clear that a big reason books and comics and films and music exist is to give people a way to talk about things without talking about them.

That was his skill. Like a travel agent of the imagination.

Even the most reckless action was a consequence of what had gone before, just as every loud mistake in the world was the product of some quiet and secret pain.