Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.

If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

We look back to the most important moment in our history, and that becomes the dividing line between what we were and what we are now.

But the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Jefferson Jeffersonis that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just an orange juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became rich and powerful, he went to court, made "Jefferson" his middle name, and then changed his first name to "Dr." Capital D. Lowercase r. Period.

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

Whether the author intended a symbolic resonance to exist in her book is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it's there. Because the book does not exist for the benefit of the author, the book exists for the benefit of YOU. If we as readers can have a bigger and richer experience with the world as a result of reading a symbol and that symbol wasn't intended by the author, WE STILL WIN.