“The time to read Madame Bovary is when your romantic hopes and desires have crashed, and you will believe that your future relationships will have disappointing - even devastating - consequences.”

“You live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.”

“...but you live your life at the time you live it—you don’t have much of an overview when what’s happening to you is still happening.”

“The desire to never leave your side, the desire to never see you again. The desire to see your face asleep on the pillow beside my face and to see your eyes open in the morning when I lie next to you—just watching you, waiting for you to wake up.”

“Just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally - all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences - are nonetheless 'related'. We associate people with each other for emotional not for factual reasons - people who've never met each other, who don't even know each other exists; people, even, who have forgotten us.”

“Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.”

“Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you”