To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Every day you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life.

the shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

He died alone because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone.

An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.