You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

Salad bars are like a restaurant's lungs. They soak up the impurities and bacteria in the environment, leaving you with much cleaner air to enjoy.

She thought about her life and how lost she’d felt for most of it. She thought about the way that all truths she’d been taught to consider valuable invariably conflicted with the world as it was actually lived. How could a person be so utterly lost, yet remain living?

All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

Destiny is what we work toward. The future doesn't exist yet. Fate is for losers!

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.