His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he'd gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between.

The paradox of the English country house is that its state of permanent decline, the fact that its heyday is always behind it, is part of the seduction, just as it is part of the seduction of books in general.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.

You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don’t have anything worth giving.