Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.
She doesn’t recognize the number – none of her friends use their phones as phones anymore.
I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time.
He felt comfortable and broken-in like favourite jeans.
I longed for Mum in the most primitive way.
We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
It is a well-known fact that hate shows up on your face once you’re forty.
Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life.
Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.” Maya is shaking her head. “Dad, I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” “We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.
People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
But the best parts of him were in his books. I suppose I could always read those if I missed him too much. I haven’t wanted to read one yet, though.
Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But it’s forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.
But you, you can never do anything hard. And I let you be that way.
You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
Death is a state of mind – many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.
Ask two people to tell you anything, you’ll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don’t know something for yourself, you just can’t be sure.
I do believe that food lobbies exert enormous, at times insidious, power over what we eat, that our water supplies are not being protected as much as they probably should be and that, in general, people are more interested in smart phones than museums.
The things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.
Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you’re reading an entirely different book.
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.