“I have but one candle of life to burn, and i would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light.”

“Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of... whatever. FACE THE FACTS. THEN act.”

“The irrational thoughts were the ones with the power to burn holes in your gut.”

“Reading never wears me out.”

“Nine years ago, my sister handed me a paperback she had picked up in an airport shop on her way to India. It was a gloomy-looking book, with a black an white photo of a steam train approaching through fog on the cover. Cutting across the top of the photo was . . . an author's name I did not know: J.K. Rowling. I began to read the novel and by page three, I was hooked.”

“I sleep with the lights on now. Not because I’m afraid of the dark, but because I like to keep the night as far away as I can.”

“Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says.No, Olivia, just one."How about four?"Two."Three."Oh, all right, three. But that's it!”