I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.

Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.

She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

The books you love best - those are the immensity of the sea.

In seventh grade I gradually became aware that that quickness of feeling was something I was supposed to have outgrown. I was rather guileless, I think, or at least I was when it came to the people I cared about.