The Map That Leads to You

by J.P. Monninger

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

“A book is a companion, though. You can read it in a special place, like on a train to Amsterdam, then you carry it home and you chuck it on a shelf, and then years later you remember that feeling you had on the train when you were young. It’s like a little island in time. If you love the book, you can give it to someone else. And you can discover it over and over, and it’s like seeing an old friend. Can’t do that with a digital file.”

“What’s the opposite of a romantic? I’ve always wondered.” “An accountant, I guess. A person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

He lips came together in a pucker.

Such a bad editor

“I thought it would be bigger,” I said, leaning close to him to see the book. “A woman should never say that to a man.”

Have you ever heard someone say that books are places we visit and that when we run into people who have read the books we have read, it’s the same as if we had traveled to the same locations? We know something about them because they have lived in the same worlds we have lived. We know what they live for.”