"Time heals all wounds."
"A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give."
"Good books are for consideration after, too."
"Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too."
"Was there even such a thing as normall? People had terrible things behing their faces sometimes. He knew that now."
"Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity"
"A change is as good as a rest."
"Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map."
"It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered."
"Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book."
"At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back."
"What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell."
"Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality."
"It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything."
"Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps."
"And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out."