I am a hell-breathing fire monster and I will not totter.

I am in love, never-to-recover, twisted-up sick in love with a boy I can't have.

Music carries the weight of being human, takes it away so you don't have to think at all, you just have to listen.

How does a person go from being like a decorative component in the house that is your life - a nice table, perhaps - to being the pipes, the foundation, the center beam without which the entire structure falls apart? How does a barely noticable star become your very own sun?

So I hope he never does kiss me. That would be nothing but a disaster. No one needs to see me fall apart like that. Least of all him.

Our memories are what make us who we are. Some are real. Some are made up. But they are the stories that tell us who we are. Without them we are nobody.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

'If you think I'm one of the people who try to be funny at breakfast you're wrong,' he said. 'I'm invariably ill-tempered in the early morning.'

I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one if so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word.

What happened to me is something everybody knows and no one knows. It's something everybody cares about but nobody cares about. It's as common as cereal for breakfast. There are laws that say it's illegal, but hardly anyone goes to jail for it.

Go ahead. Name me the scientists who've cured diseases. Name me the scientists who discovered the medications that may be helping you right now as you read this. You can't, can you? You can't name the titles of their published academic papers. You can't even tell me how they discovered what they discovered. But I guarantee you can name me twenty talentless people who got famous for doing nothing.

Sometimes it felt like he'd missed out on some special class everyone else had passed in college. The one where they figured out how to find cool jobs or decided to pursue some artitic passion while slinging pints or waiting tables.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.

'I find myself struggling to be sensible about matters of the heart.'

Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

...I've been looking for an excuse to talk to you for two days.

"If we make it out of here alive, I'm going to kiss you unconscious."