But it's not enough to be in love. It's about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it's what work you do ... Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.

Life does often get in the way of one's reading.

I know something of shame...How can we not all feel it? We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own adventure and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors......I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short. Sometimes I think God created the darkness just so he didn't have to look at us all the time.

Only sometimes when we pick and choose among the rules we discover later that we have set aside something precious in the process.

I later realized that this is my view of passion: It is rooted in genuine friendship. Chemistry may be two strangers exchanging smoldering looks—but passion has to be able to survive at least a twenty-minute conversation!

But it's not enough to be in love. It's about how you spend your days, what you do together, who you choose as friends, and most of all it's what work you do ... Better to break both our hearts now than watch them wither away over time.

I tell myself it does not matter what one reads-favorite authors, particular themes-as long as we read something. It is not even important to own the books.