The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.

That's the great thing about being in the third grade. If you've got one polysyllabic adjective, everyone thinks you're a genius.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

We all matter - maybe less then a lot but always more than none.

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.

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.