Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.

For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.

I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.

Reading begets reading.