He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.

The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.

As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn't intend to keep.