That's why people grow weary of listening to Dumpees obsess over their troubles: getting dumped is predictable, repetitive, and boring. They want to stay friends; they feel smothered; it's always them and it's never you; and afterward, you're devastated and their relieved; it's over for them and just starting for you.

Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

Coal miners don't get coal miners' block.

Observation: It would be awesome to fly in a superfast airplane that could chase the sunrise around the world for a while.

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla.

What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.