It’s a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person’s grievances are. You don’t want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn’t already guessed.

In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn

In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.

People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.

People, you’ll find, aren’t usually all good or bad. Sometimes they’re just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they’re mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.

Well, for one, you have to remember not to scream. Once you have their attention, whispering is much more effective. Screaming ghosts scare people, you know.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

It was a nice day, and I don’t mean that it was sunny either. It was humid and not too cool, like winter was getting annoyed with itself and wanted it to be spring just as much as everyone else.

My brain said no. But my heart!

It’s sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.

You can’t avoid orphan stories, child. Every story is an orphan story. We are all orphaned sooner or later.

The truth is, sometimes too much can happen in a relationship, and then there’s nothing anyone can do or say. It’s broken.

Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren’t.

I met a traveller from an ancient land.

The words you can’t find, you borrow.

It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Oh, all stories are the same, aren’t they? Men and women fall in love or out of love. People are born; people die. It al ends happily or it all ends sadly, and the difference matters only to the people involved.

My beautiful Win. I wanted to kiss him on every last broken place, but his mother and my lawyer were there. So, instead I started to cry.

And I was crying for gravity. It had sent me down the stairs, and I’d thought that meant something, but maybe it was just the direction that all things tend to flow.

Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.

It is a lie that people who love each other must know everything about each other. Love must occasionally allow for a gap.

A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.

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.

Let’s stay young forever. Young, stupid, and pretty. Sounds like a plan, don’t you think?

Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you’re reading an entirely different book.

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

Daddy always said that an option that you know to have a bad outcome is only a fool’s option, i.e., not an option at all. And I liked to think that Daddy hadn’t raised a fool.

Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.

I know you did, lass. You’re the toughest girl I know.’Lass’? Where did that come from?I don’t know. I just felt the urge to call you that.

I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.

I longed for Mum in the most primitive way.

I don’t think I would have minded you being the keeper of my secrets.

An “online presence” is “all the true things and all the lies about a person on the Internet.

I felt guilty, but lighter. I had turned my problem into someone else’s.

I thought of summer as the living time; the rest of the year was the backward time, the writing time.

The casualities seemed to go on and on. Just when I thought I was done losing her, I would find yet another way to love her all over again.

He kissed me, though not in a sexy way. Gentle. Tender.

Maybe if I’d been braver in that moment, I would have cried.

It wasn’t even 8:00 yet. Pretty early for such deep thoughts.

A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.

But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that’s life, isn’t it?

Violence should not always beget more violence.

Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down the road and someday, you do not now when, you will make a wrong tun. At the end of the road, when you’re least expecting it, he (or indeed she) will be there.

Betty inhales sharply, ‘It’s just I thought I had lost you forever.’ Oh, Betty, don’t you know there’s no such thing as forever?

The scent is sweet and meloncholy. A bit like dying, a bit like falling in love.

Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.

I’m in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don’t mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationally.

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

When I was in my twenties and broke, I’d buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

If this were a novel, I’d stop reading right now. I’d throw it across the room.

There’s a difference between being alive and living.

It’s a tragic fact to die in an accident.

Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn’t even have a website then.

Sometimes, readers, when they’re young, are given, say, a book like ‘Moby Dick’ to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it’s not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you’ll really love to read, necessarily.

The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.

She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)

To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.

Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.

He had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery.

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.

He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.

Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

‘Friendship,’ Marx said, ‘is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.’

A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen world.

There is no purity to bearing pain alone.

The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final.

Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.

‘What is a game?’ Marx said. ‘it’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss was permanent, ever.’

If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.

My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.

“I accept your condemnation,” I said.

There’s a strange sort of quiet when you’re dying. It’s as if you’re in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.

You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you.

It’s sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.

Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everyone.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn’t.

What are you reading?” Owen asks. “Charlotte’s Web,” Liz says. “It’s really sad. One of the main characters just died.” “You ought to read the book from end to beginning,” Owen jokes. “That way, no one dies, and it’s always a happy ending.

Remember, Maya: 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.

We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.

You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . 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.

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.

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.

Intimacy doesn’t have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.

I have so much paperwork. I’m afraid my paperwork has paperwork.