“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

Great books help you understand, and they help you feel understood.

I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.

She loved mysteries so much that she became one.

What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

Grief does not change you, It reveals you.

There is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.

God knows that’s what everyone else does.

You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

Poetry is just so emo.” he said. “Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

The good times and the bad times both will pass.

There’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.

There is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

I don’t think anyone should be banned. If you don’t like a book, set it aside.

Every object strives for its proper place. A book seeks to be near its truest admirer. Just as this helpless moth seeks to be near the candle that infatuates him.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.

I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they’d once belonged to the sea.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored.