Books remember all the things you cannot contain.

It's a happy life, but someone is missing. It's a happy life, and someone is missing.

Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

Library books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others.

After most deaths, I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything’s changed….there’s a hole. It’s person-shaped and it follows you everywhere…. For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.

The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder.

Can I tell you something? It wasn't so bad. Not so bad at all right then, me scowling at the dirt, James in his bed, the way it always always was. Look, if that's all that happened, if his dying just meant that I would be waiting for him to say something instead of listening to him say something, it would have been fine.