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No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World
Amelia’s experience, most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.
He is too young to like so little.
They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
But me-also-thinks my latter-day reaction speaks to the necessity of encountering stories at precisely the right time in our lives. Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.
Who are these people who think a book comes with a guarantee that they will like it? He
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 least carbonated.
The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
Sometimes, after the customers and the employees have left, she thinks that she and A.J. are the only people in the world. No one else seems as real as he does.
People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?
pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.”
“But she seems to prefer your company to anyone else’s, certainly anyone her own age, and that probably isn’t healthy.” “Why isn’t it healthy?” Now A.J.’s spine is tingling unpleasantly. “She’s going to end up just like you,”
She is an enthusiastic if not overly graceful mouse. She scurries with abandon. She wrinkles her nose in a recognizably mousy way. She wags her pipe-cleaner tail, which had been painstakingly coiled by him. He knows a career in dance is not in her future. Ismay, who mans the table with him, hands him a Kleenex.
He wants to take a picture, but he doesn’t want to do the thing where you stop to take a picture.
When I read a book, I want you to be reading it at the same time. I want to know what would Amelia think of it. I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy.”
Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.
Their happiness is not her unhappiness. Unless
Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” both by ZZ Packer, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” by Amy Hempel, “Fat” by Raymond Carver, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway.
place is not really a place without a bookstore.”
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 that we can be exhilarated every now and again.
love you,” she says with a resigned shrug. “I want to leave you with something cleverer than that, but it’s all I know.”
read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.
“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”
slow reader, so I never got the knack for it.” “You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you,”
