Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.

He will try again. He will never stop trying. “Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love.” Maya is shaking her head. “Dad, I’m sorry. I don’t understand.” “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.”

In the end, we are collected works.

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.

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.

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.

Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.

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.

“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.