"I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched."

"You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are."

"The clock in his car hadn’t adjusted to daylight savings time yet and said four-fifteen when it was really five-fifteen. He probably didn’t have time to fiddle with it, or it was tricky, as car clocks are. I didn’t mind. You can’t mind these things, you just can’t, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans, or at least other people who can’t work clocks. You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can’t mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time."

"Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else’s, dying again."

"The grey paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snow flake of decay."

"Nobody believes the identities we’ve made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now - as though people has true cores once, but chucked them away and replaced them with something more attractive but also hollow."

"I thought she would leave, but she just stood there, watching me. I waved at her and smiled, but her eyes seemed fixed on something behind me, something monstrous that had already drained the blood from her face, and I felt too afraid to turn around to see. But there was nothing behind me, of course—except maybe the dead guy. I stopped waving. My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don’t remember how it ended—if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever. Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one."

"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."

"An airport isn’t even a real place. It’s a pit stop, an in-between area, a “nowhere”, a technicality - a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of transcontinental jet flight. Airports are where you go right after you’ve died and before you get shipped off to wherever you’re going next. They’re the present tense crystallized into aluminum, concrete, and bad lighting."

"Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green."

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."