Gabrielle Zevin

Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you're the only person in the room.

Why are you crying?""I was reading.

It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.

All women are many women! I'm afraid you've never known very much about women.

People are capable of great, great change during the span of one lifetime. And women even more than men.

And then, despite the fact that A. J. does not believe in God, he closes his eyes and thanks whomever, the higher power, with all his porcupine heart.

Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop

A place is not really a place without a bookstore.

I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be__asically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful__onfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups _ la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children's books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and__ imagine this goes without saying__ampires.

When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

Someday, we__l run into each other again, I know it.Maybe I__l be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,that__ when I__l deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can__ hook your boat to mine, because I__ liable to sink us both.

It's hard to believe. Where does the times go?' Betty sighs. 'I've always hated that phrase. It makes it would like time went on a holiday, and is expected back any day now. Time flies is another one I hate. Apparently, time does quite a bit of traveling, though.

If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.

In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.

A life isn't measured in hours and minutes. It's the quality, not the length.

There's a difference between being alive and living.