If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn’t all that perfect.
The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.
Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.
It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.
The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.
Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.
The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.
Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable.
Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.
We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.
The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [...] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.
