The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don’t make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you’re always good, the story will be very short.
It’s easier to be happy than to be sad. Being sad takes alot of work. It’s exhausting.
She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
I do not believe in God. I have no religion. But this to me is as close to a church as I have known in this life. It is a holy place. With bookstores like this, I feel confident in saying that there will be a book business for a very long time.
My grandmother was married for fifty-two years, until my grandfather died. She used to say that a bad marriage was one that hadn’t had enough time to get good again.
You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else.
On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz’s point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end.
His heart is too full, and no words to release it. I know what words do, he thinks. They let us feel less.
If Jenny were a book, she would be a paperback just out of the box – no dog ears, no waterlogging, no creases in her spine.
The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.
You call your mother. You’re in a panic, but as soon as your mother answers the phone, you relax. When your mother is worrying about something, it means that you won’t have to.
Turns out I really like bookstores. You know, I meet a lot of people in my line of work. A lot of folks pass through Alice Island, especially in the summer. I’ve seen movie people on vacation and I’ve seen music people and newspeople, too. There ain’t nobody in the world like book people. It’s a business of gentlemen and gentlewoman.
The Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” both by ZZ Packer, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, “Fat” by Raymond Carver, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway.
You love being Ruby’s mother, but loving Ruby does not stop you from wanting things for yourself.
In the future, he will rethink his unlocked-door policy. Though it had occurred to him that something might be stolen, he had never considered the possibility that something might be left.
When you think about it, isn’t a person just a structure built in reaction to the landscape and the weather?
And I know that bad people deserve what they get, but oh, how we hate to be alone.
But jackets are the redheaded stepchildren of book publishing.
My point is, it’s tempting,” she said. “It is certainly tempting to continue on with something because it has already begun.
We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.