Since i couldn’t remember the “real” first time i’d lost my virginity, this would have become my de facto first time. I wanted a better story then: I did it with this boy who i...

There’s the tree with the branches that everyone sees, and then there’s the upside-down root tree, growing the opposite way. So Earth is the branches, growing in opposing but perfect symmetry. The branches don’t think...

A.J. watches Maya in her pink party dress, and he feels a vaguely familiar, slightly intolerable bubbling inside of him. He wants to laugh out loud or punch a wall. He feels drunk or at...

I know he’s a good person. And he said he was sorry. And I love him. And when you love a person, you have to forgive him sometimes.

I’m like a unicorn; I’m a midlist writer who hasn’t done anything else but write. But because I wasn’t amazingly famous, I didn’t become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan...

Death is a state of mind—many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.

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

But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, ’cause I’m liable to sink us both. (222)

I’m very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it’s great to be aware of how publishing works.

There’s a pleasure to loving someone even when you know there’s no chance in them loving you back. The pain I felt let me know I was still alive.

Do you like Moby Dick?” he asks.”I hate it,” she says. “And I don’t say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But...

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads....

When I first started writing, I used to listen to music all the time because it would make time pass more quickly. And then I started to wonder if the music wasn’t affecting my writing...

All of these teeth had once been in real, live people. They had talked and smiled and eaten and sang and cursed and prayed. They had brushed and flossed and died. In English class, we...

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

Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.

Sometimes, readers, when they’re young, are given, say, a book like ‘Moby Dick’ to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it’s not something that somebody who has never read a book before...

The words you can’t find, you borrow.We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.My life is in these books,...

What were you like,” I asked her. “we’re you happy? Or were you smiling because they told you to?

It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.

In truth, she hadn’t put much thought into whether she was happy before. She supposes that since she never thought about it, she must have been happy. People who are happy don’t really need to...

Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank...

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 wondered if the person who really loves you is the person who knows all your stories, the person who WANTS to know all your stories.

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

They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.

People choose to read, and it takes effort. It’s not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It’s more than a hobby.

There are many challenges to long distance running, but one of the greatest is the question of where to put on’s house keys.

Wounds are like water set to boil – they heal best left unwatched…

For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually ‘Charlotte’s Web.’

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—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction...

But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking.

It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.

His heart is too full, and no words to release it.

I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy...

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she...

…lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn’t even have a website then.

…but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

Hi there,” squeaked a precocious little voice, “you are speaking to Chloe Fusakawa, and I have just learned how to answer the phone.

Theo looked at me with his smoldering Jesus eyes, and the Catholic schoolgirl in me crossed her legs.

It was funny how dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or...

I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn’t a reader yet has just not found the right book.

Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it.Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your...

That spring, Amelia takes Maya to the drugstore and lets her choose any polish color she likes. “How do you pick?” Maya says. “Sometimes I ask myself how I’m feeling,” Amelia says. “Sometimes I ask...

My grandparents used to bring me books every time they saw me.

Every book is a world.

She doesn’t recognize the number—none of her friends use their phones as phones anymore.

On the board, Mr. Beery had written “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.” I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be inspirational, thematic, or a joke about making sure to...