This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book. - John Crowley

Not until the lamp is utterly shattered,” she said, “and all pages everywhere sealed up in mildew — but then one would only cease to be, wouldn’t one? Till then, simply changelessness. How deliciously restful. It’s what one wanted, isn’t it, what one had prepared for and sought after — what one had invented out of all the terrible longings and dissatisfactions, never knowing that this exactly was what one was inventing — and yet having no other reason, all along, but this. How pleasant and odd that it should be so….

They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind her lids became ordered and doors opened; when conscious thought grew owl's wings and talons and became other than conscious.