It looked like an old painting, but real - everything achingly idyllic in the morning light - and I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

We have this weird thing in the world where you don't get insulted for what you do, you get insulted for who you are.

Nerdighters make me believe in America again.

Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading. "Did you like it?" His dad asked. "Yup," Colin said. He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

You're not boring. You've got to stop saying that, or people will start believing you.

People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

Jesus, I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it.