I heard this old country guy say once, “I think you decide pretty early on how happy you’re going to be, and then you just go on and be it.” But I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot of the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.

We all wanted to be somebody else. Somebody braver, or more handsome, or smarter. It’s what children want. It’s what you grow out of, if you’re lucky. If you don’t, it’s a lifetime of agony.

In times of grief, you’re waiting for something to happen, but the thing you’re waiting for has already taken place.

You wreck your own life and then, very gently, you wreck the lives of those around you.

Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life – every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him – everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.

Here’s another thing: There are certain wounds that never heal, certain hurts that never leave you alone, like a broken bone that heals wrong and always twinges when it’s about to rain.

But I don’t think that’s the case for a lot of people. For a lot of people, for a lot the people I met in the bin, I think personal choice has very little to do with it.

Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it’s my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o’clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.

She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.

She had always been a chameleon, taking on accents and manners suited to her circumstance, but now she felt as though she had changed into something new, and she couldn’t change back.