How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?

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

I don't think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.

And as we kept driving north, the whole family in the care together, it got darker, and snowier, until finally the road delivered us to the one place that all my youthful trips west never could: home.

But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.