In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.

The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention.

If I'd waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.

We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.

Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying.

You don't have to have one emotion at a time.

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.

Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

It was Christ who willingly went to the cross, and it was our sins that took him there.

He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.

I never got along in school really - I already knew what I wanted to do. I have never in my life got a paycheck from anywhere in the world that asked if I went to school.

"After you were bitten, i knew what would happen. I waited for you to change, every night, so i could bring you back and keep you from getting hurt." "How long did you wait?" "I haven't stopped."

I always say, you're going to have to ask someone else, but I believe the purpose is to stand as a reconciler, a bridge builder.

The imitator treads a beaten walk, and with all his diligence can only find a few flowers or branches untouched by his predecessor, the refuse of contempt, or the omissions of negligence.

An isolated pawn spreads gloom all over the chessboard.

There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics.