To really be a nerd, she'd decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.

I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.

Why are you lying awake, thinking that you're a terrible person? To keep my mind occupied when I can't sleep. Some people count sheep. I self-loathe.

Eleanor,” he said, just because he liked saying it, “why do you like me?” “I don’t like you.” He waited. And waited… Then he started to laugh. “You’re kind of mean,” he said. “Don’t laugh. It just encourages me.

I just had this feeling about you," she said. "Is that foolish?" "I hope not.

His parents never talked about how they met, but when Park was younger, he used to try to imagine it. He loved how much they loved each other. It was the thing he thought about when he woke up scared in the middle of the night. Not that they loved him--they were his parents, they had to love him. That they loved each other. They didn't have to do that.

It was like their lives were overlapping lines, like they had their own gravity. Usually, that serendipity thing felt like the nicest thing the universe had ever done for her.