Julie Schumacher

“I love to sleep. My astrological sign is the sloth.”

“Boredom is why God invented books.”

“Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, "Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?”

“My mother says that some books are good no matter when you read them, and some are good at a particular moment; they come into your life at just the right time.”

“I had just wanted to be part of a story; I wanted to be a person who had a story to tell.”

“Unknown meaning, I thought. That was me.”

“Opening a book in the middle of a chapter always made me feel like I was interrupting a group of strangers, wandering unannounced into their villages and apartments and taxis and slums.”

“By the way, I'm not usually attracted to danger," I said. "Up until now I've led a pretty boring life." "Boredom is good!" Dr. Rasman looked pleased. "Boredom is why God invented books. Are you still in your book club?”

“Do you want to stand here talking about the car, or are you going to get in it?" CeeCee asked. I was the person with horrible red hair and a mound of pink crust surrounding a diamond in her ear. I was at risk, and I had just made out with a girl in a bathroom. I got into the car.”

“Are you going to redye it?" "No. My mother hates it, so I'm going to keep it," I said.”

“The intriguing thing about playing Scrabble is that as soon as the board is set up in front of me, I don't know any words. Other than cat and bat and rat, everything disappears from the language drawer in my brain. My mother, on the other hand, who normally speaks English like a regular person, spells things like qiviut ("wool of the muskox") and hake.”

“We can't stick together if we're going to different places," CeeCee said.”

“To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?”

“There is something absent in me, I thought. Something incomplete. Even my mother couldn't describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.”

“...And as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared.”

“A drowning person doesn't rescue herself.”