“You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”

“Honor is truth. Truth has many meanings, but it first means that you have to be true to yourself. It is hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself.”

“Do you have any idea how hard a story is to write? My brain is jumpy, and my heart doesn't know where to live. Is Male is such an imperfect narrator, but he will try to finish his tale.”

“Read to your heart’s content. Though if you are a reader, the heart is never content.”

“Writing is about making choices, Miss Dovecott says. One word or phrase or title over another. So many options that they're almost overwhelming. Which is why it is sometimes so easy to grab the cliché, to reach out to what is familiar. But don't. Because metaphor is all about the comparison of two unfamiliar, unlike things.”

“You just want to keep me on this hook, right? So I'll keep chasing after you and you can feel good about yourself. As soon as I start to get over you, you just reel me back in. You're so screwed up in the head. But I'm telling you, this is it. You don't get to have me anymore. Not as your friend or your admirer or anything. I'm through.”

“Reading, she tells me, is what she does best. She loves it because it uses the whole of her, the right and the left, the hemispheres of reason and imagination. She discovered as a child that a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a cary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control.”