The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [...] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.