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“Everybody knows that.”

“Assume for a moment that everybody is wrong.”

“Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. That’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing.

Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second.

Such is the power of words, of writing, of books. Words you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past and place it right alongside your chaotic present.

“But that only happens in books,” my mother, pretty much immune to the power of the written word, would say.

Exactly. That’s why I can’t stop reading them.

It wasn’t a death wish. It was a see-how-close-you-can-get-and-live wish.

Young soldiers had a lot of expectations and fantasies about how it would be and what they would do and feel. Invariably wrong, those expectations.

Angels in the house always die in the books they preside over because early ascension into heaven is their reward—and because their goodness makes them boring.

Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you.

Kylar woke two hours before dawn and briefly wondered if death would be too high a price to pay for a full night’s sleep.

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies.

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.

“Here I thought they were invincible.”

“They’re immortal. It’s not the same thing.”