Do you stop reading a book because you don’t want to watch the characters you like turn out to be unlikable, or the ones with which you identify denied the happy ending you believe they deserve?

I already told you a ghost story,” she said at last. “The one where the wife was invisible to the husband and the truth of the marriage was invisible to her.

Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who.

I realize no one thinks being a librarian is as awesome as being a neurosurgeon, but I always thought I was doing something valuable, putting books in the hands of readers. Books can save lives, too. I really believe that.

I think it’s possible that when you think that the future might bring great sadness, you become more generous that you ever has been before, so you can carry other people’s happiness with you.

And most, like me, were drawn to the miracle of the blank page and how, when seeded with letters, it blossomed into words and sentences and paragraphs and stories.

A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something ‘measured’ and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven ’creativity.

What you’re thinking of as the end of the story now, is only the end of the chapter.

Freedom, he was learning, was not a set point, like the temperature at which water freezes, but something mutable, a moving target.

Somewhere in the unfolding story, something is going to happen that will change everything that happens after it.