This is what I love about novels – both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.
I’m not sure if I’m depressed. I mean, I’m not exactly sad. But I’m not exactly happy either. I can laugh and joke and smile during the day, But sometimes when I’m alone at night I forget how to feel.
We’re all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.
When we read the right book generously, it can change the way think about the world around us.
The past feels distant, even when it’s near. The future feels assured, even when it isn’t.
We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul labouring in isolation. We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature.
Gratitude is the proper response for the absolute astonishment of getting to be alive, and aware, and an essential part of this crazy, sprawling story.
You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller.
You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that’s the secret weapon of the bookstore – is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.
Your responsibility is not to the people you’re making the gift for, but the gift itself.
One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John Green If you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.
One of those moments he knew he’d remember and look back on, one of those moments that he’d try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.
So we gave up. I’d finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We’d failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved.
Life works best when we think of people as people.
The nature of the love between a parent and child really is literally stronger than death. As long as either person in that relationship is alive, that relationship is still alive.
I’m a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that’s been with us a long time – and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.
I think forever is an incorrect concept.
You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet.
I inherited that penchant for intellectualism, a character flaw that these days can only be thoroughly eradicated by getting Z’ed up.
In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I’d never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.