The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

by Gabrielle Zevin

I never got around to it. I don’t know. A million retrospectively idiotic reasons, the main one being that I am an idiot,

A.J. kisses his daughter on the forehead. He is delighted to have produced such a fantastic nerd.

I would rather you have bought my daughter something less destructive like a crack pipe.”

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, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels. The analogy he is looking for is almost there. We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that. 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 anyway, and they don’t remember those for very long. No, not very long.

we are what we love. We are that we love.”

“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.”