“- even in the midst of grief the mind grapples with a hundred impressions: a pain below the heart, an odor on the breeze.”

“But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.”

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”

“Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.”

“his heart laced with regret.”

“His heart was a catapult in his chest.”

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”