“The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.”

“Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.”

“...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.”

“It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...”

“Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all ...”

“And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarifi...”

“If a man does not work passionately - even furiously - at being the best in the world at what he does, he fails his talent, his destiny, and his God.”

“I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prov...”

“Not everything you're good at is what you're called to do.”

“The soul might be silent but the servant of the soul has always got a voice and it has got one for a reason.”