But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.

If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings.

The light was cut to lace by the trees that had grown so thick with leaves in the last few months.