For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

I didn't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it.

I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.

For she had embodied the Great Perhaps--she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. - Van Houten

What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

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.