Janine smiles. “Strike the second sentence. Reader will know. Show, don’t tell.
An “online presence” is “all the true things and all the lies about a person on the Internet.
Did you have a ship?” Maya asks. “Yes. It had books on it, and it really was more of a research vessel. We studied a lot.” “You’re ruining this story.” “It’s a fact, Maya. There are murdering kinds of pirates and researching kinds of pirates, and your daddy was the latter.
Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.
Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature.
The store is fifteen Mayas wide and twenty Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than thirty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.
Maya has chosen to be ring bearer because the job has more responsibility than flower girl. “If you lose a flower, you get another flower,” Maya reasons. “If you lose the ring, everyone is sad forever.
But then again, maybe ‘I will’ is nicer. It has the future in it. ‘I do’ just has the present.
Novels certainly have their charms, but the most elegant creation in the prose universe is a short story.
Babies move more than books and aren’t as conveniently shaped.
I don’t think you can really run away from things. They tend to follow you” -Anya.
You don’t choose a book the book chooses you.
It is lucky, she thinks, that we don’t feel all the love inside us every moment. We couldn’t breathe or walk or eat. It is lucky that it just flares up every now and again then resolves itself into a manageable dormancy.
I felt guilty, but lighter. I had turned my problem into someone else’s.
The one real fight they’d ever had was over David Foster Wallace.
From Nic’s point of view, her older sister had been a primer on how not to live her life.
It is lucky, she thinks, that we don’t feel all the love inside us every moment.
You wouldn’t be abandoning me if you stopped to get a Band-Aid, you know.
She could remember the sensation of flying through the air, which seemed to last an eternity. She could remember feeling reckless, happy, and doomed, all at the same time. She could remember thinking, I am above gravity.
Oh, you don’t want to hear all my sad stories. I can’t even bear to tell them anymore. Screw the past, right?