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Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t share your sensibilities and interests. (It is, right?)
Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.
No Man Is an Island; Every Book Is a World
In Amelia’s experience, most people’s problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance.
They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?
a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.
I loathe collectible books anyway. People getting all moony over particular paper carcasses. It’s the ideas that matter, man. The words,”
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.
She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.
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. Insane. At first, he thinks this is happiness, but then he determines it’s love. Fucking love, he thinks. What a bother.
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.
I know that bad people deserve what they get, but oh, how we hate to be alone.”
Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But it’s forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.”
“I like to take pictures of my drinks.” “They’re like family,” A.J. says. “They’re better than family.”
pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing.”
I want you to be mine. I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart, Amy.”
“A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.”
Doesn’t seem like they’re going in with their eyes closed,” Lambiase says. “He knows she isn’t perfect. She knows he definitely isn’t perfect. They know there’s no such thing as perfect.”
“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”
(Is a twist less satisfying if you know it’s coming? Is a twist that you can’t predict symptomatic of bad construction?
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 it is. What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to unhappiness in the world at any given time?
“The thing about weddings,” he says, “is that they can make a person feel lonely as hell.”
The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.
She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.
moue,”
“You must keep up with the times,” she continues. “Why must I? What is so great about the times?”
A.J. has often reflected that, bit by bit, all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat.
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.
this is what the point of it all is. To connect, my dear little nerd. Only connect.
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.
We are not quite novels.
We are not quite short stories.
In the end, we are collected works.
He has read enough to know there are no collections where each story is perfect. Some hits. Some misses. If you’re lucky, a standout. And in the end, people only really remember the standouts ...
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“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.”
“You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you,” Ismay says.
