“I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.”

“But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think of other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time.”

“Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.”

“But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.”

“I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.”

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a bo...”

“Some experiences are universal. A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than books.”

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books”

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”

“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.”

“Love is not the absence of logicbut logic examined and recalculatedheated and curved to fitinside the contours of the heart”

“There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is a...”

“I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later...”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, cap...”