“Some areas of life are not meant to overlap.”

“I could have run after him. I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn’t I knew what I preferred, and that was—I didn’t want to know. Rather, I wanted to believe.”

“I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that—they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill. ”

“Men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed.”

“I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates. ”

“You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.”

“The moving landscape provides an absorbing diversion which frees the mind & gives us a fresh viewpoint, & we’re most at ease with the word when we walk because everything is happening at a manageable pace.”