You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

The greatest gift you can give anyone is your undivided attention.

If I'd waited until I was well rested to read, I never would have read anything.

We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.

Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying.

You don't have to have one emotion at a time.

I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.

We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.

That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.

In an idealized world, we would all be able to do what our English teachers told us to do, which is to write beautiful prose where enthusiasm is conveyed by word choice and grammar.

Evil almost always starts with small cruelties.

When you see the mega-stars doing really, really well, it gives you hope that you could probably do that too.

There is nothing in my life where I view myself as a 1920s person.

Good actors never use the script unless it's amazing writing. All the good actors I've worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.

C'mon Pudge. I'm teasing. You have to be tough. I didn't know how bad it was-- and I'm sorry, and they'll regret it-- but you have to be tough.

She danced the dance of flames and fire, and the dance of swords and spears; she danced the dance of stars and the dance of space, and then she danced the dance of flowers in the wind.

The truth is a lot easier to see when you stop assuming you already have it.

Modesty is great, and quietness is nice, but sometimes it's much more fun to be decadent.

Be content to love, to dazzle in the light, If only for moments… And then be gone, With gladness in your heart, Before the creeping shadows Claim too much your sadness at leaving.

Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue.

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.