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.

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.

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.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.

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.