Random questions are the least random of all questions.

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 shaved this morning for precisely that reason. I was like, 'Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.

The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic

And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause for hope?

Teenagers have more intense reading experiences because they've had fewer of them. It's like the first time you fall in love. You have a connection to that first person you fell in love with because it was so intense and unprecedented.

You cannot invent an algorithm that is as good at recommending books as a good bookseller, and that's the secret weapon of the bookstore - is that no algorithm will ever understand readers the way that other readers can understand readers.