It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It’s just like Animal Planet, only we’ve got Cover Girl and Victoria’s Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom’s Half-Yearly Sale.

Because words were hills and valleys you traveled, so lovely sometimes that they hurt your eyes.

Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.

You could put your confusion and upset and worries into whatever book you were reading. You could sort of set them down in there, and you could come out with your head on a little straighter. I don't why stories worked that way, but they did.

We should not give away a moment to anyone who does not deserve it.

...wanting things for the wrong reasons can turn anyone's life into a marshmallow on a stick over a hot fire: impossibly messy and eventually consumed, one way or another.

But then there are the van Goghs and Hemingways and Mozarts, those who feel a hunger so deep, so far down, that greatness lies there too, nestled somewhere within it. Those who get their inner voice and direction from the cool mysterious insides of the moon, and not from the earth like the rest of us.