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.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else.

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.