“Don't you think it would be interesting if you could read the story of your life- written perfectly truthfully by an omniscient author? And suppose you could only read it on this condition: that you would never forget it, but would have to go through life knowing ahead of time exactly how everything you did would turn out, and forseeing to the exact hour the time you would die. How many people do you suppose you have the courage to read it then? Or how many could suppress their curiosity sufficiently to escape from reading it, even at the price of having to live without hope, without surprise? Life is monotonous enough at best; you have to eat and sleep about so often. But imagine how deadly monotonous it would be if nothing unexpected could happen between meals?”

“Life is monotonous enough at best; you have to eat and sleep about so often. But imagine how DEADLY monotonous it would be if nothing unexpected could happen between meals.”

“how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.”

“Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.”

“In life, you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.”

“There are two kinds of books in the world--the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won't let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and if there isn't then what happens when you die, and how come the history books have so many lies in them.”