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...

Showing up is what counts.

I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don’t necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It’s not the best choice for creative writing.

You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn’t really learn, but just memorized the night before. You...

I was just thinking… isn’t it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other’s lung spontaneoulsy collapses, the one can...

On some level, I think we want our reading self to represent our best self.

You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you

Everything worth loving in this world is difficult.

Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.

Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That’s basically the highest compliment I can give.

I myself am mixed race – my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew – so I’ve always felt other.

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

Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.

I hadn’t ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on ‘Elsewhere’ that I would never write a...

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

What if I had told the boy I loved to leave and it ended up being for nothing?

Did you know that there are over three hundred words for love in canine?

The words you can’t find, you borrow.

Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.

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.

You don’t choose a book the book chooses you

I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I’ve always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what...

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so...

The difficulty of living alone is that any mess he makes he is forced to clean up himself.No, the real difficulty of living alone is that no one cares if you are upset.

Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.

That Woman is in love with her own grief.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

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

There’s a difference between being alive and living.

I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadn’t turned out to be.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

The easiest way to get old is to be technologically behind…

No one will ever love me that much again.

I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it’s the best available option at the time.