Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.

Omnis cellula e cellula," he said again. "All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.

I have guts, just not when it counts.

That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us.

What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.