“Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.”

“You are like Odysseus, who could go out onto the great sea, lose all his goods and his friends, come to the boundaries of death, and return still himself.”

“Relationships take time. They are days and nights and weeks. They are stretched and worked and kneaded into something you never imagined they could be. But when they are over, the end comes so quickly you barely have time to breathe, to blink. They are minutes and seconds, and one moment you have everything and the next you have nothing. So here’s my question: when you lose the most important person to you in the entire world, where is all the love—love you never even knew you were capable of—supposed to go?”

“Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.”

“We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you — and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.”

“Don't think you can watch all the romantic movies, soap operas, TV shows and read all the romantic books out there and not be affected. Ninety-nine percent of the romantic stuff out there is garbage... and what you put in always comes out... UGLIER!”