Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinetisimal change ripples outward —ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter —maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

Why would you try to kill this guy, Kevin? He's a genius. Nuts to your truce.

Dutch is not so much a language as an ailment of the throat.

And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future—you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.