Who but an English professor would threaten to kill a duck a day and hold up a goose as an example?

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.

He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talking, kissing, a sappy score drowning out the dialogue because the screenwriter had no idea what these two people might say to each other.

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

It's no secret that in my books I'm trying to make the comic and the serious rub up against each other just as closely and uncomfortably as I can.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?