We all use the future to escape the present.

Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave.

Is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in. It was more than that. I know it was more than that.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

The truth is that in our lives we are all going to encounter questions that should be answered, that deserve to be answered, and yet prove unanswerable.

I can't remember, because I never knew.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.