Kids absolutely not reading. I think it's because they're so screen-oriented [TVs, computers, smartphones]. They do read - girls in particular read a lot. They have a tendency to go toward the paranormal, romances, Twilight and stuff like that. And then it starts to taper off because other things take precedence, like the Kardashian sisters.

My mother was a reader, and she read to us. She read us Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was six and my brother was eight; I never forgot it.

They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.

Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.

Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones.

A dimwit thinks nothing is funny unless it's mean.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.