Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

Our children are weird. Nicely phrased.

She left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.

Everything's uglier close up," she said. "Not you," I answered.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

Compromise is when you do what I tell you and I do what I want. ~Tiny Cooper

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.