She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

I’m proud to read YA novels with cringe worthy covers. It’s like a secret: The person next to me on the train is reading terrible snake oil book, full of un-ironic poetry inspired by garbage cans, and he’s thinking “I am so much more intellectual than that frivolous young woman reading a book with a cow carrying a gnome on the cover.” He thinks I’m reading something that must taste like bubble gum and Am Not Improving Myself. What he doesn’t know is that my bubble gum book is secretly brussels sprouts and NOT ONLY is it as nutritious as a Summer Solstice day, full of literary merit and wonderful word play but it is also entertaining as fuck.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering of connotations, the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.