The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.

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

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.

I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

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