“We barely know who we are and yet we are forever searching for the answers to the most basic of questions.”

“How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer.”

“The first question we usually ask new parents is: “Is it a boy or a girl?”.There is a great answer to that one going around: “We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.”

“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”

“You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling?" "No...""To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.”

“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.”