“Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.”

“It's my belief that people enter your life at exactly the right time.”

“People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.”

“I love books where you can't get out of bed. You want to consume them in one sitting, devour them. Those are my favorites, where you've almost abandoned your life for them. That doesn't happen every time, but those are the best.”

“I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.”

“Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy,"Easy" doesn't enter into grown-up life.”