Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

Nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently.

...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.

If you asked me one day, I might say, "Well, sometimes I feel a little bit religious." If you asked me another day, I'd just say flat out, "No."

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?