Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we're quoting.

"I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass-our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to ( Read more... )

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed.

"We all like the idea that a book is created by a single person for a single reader because it's a narrative that makes sense. But the truth resists that simplicity... the Looking for Alaska that you read is not quite like the Looking for Alaska that anyone else reads."

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The fundamental thing that all critical reading does is reveal to us that there are not easy definitions that distinguish Us from Them. Reading with an eye toward metaphor allows us to become the person we're reading about while reading about them. That's why there are symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. ( Read more... )

We have a way of saying that a book is good if we liked the characters, or if it kept us turning the pages, or if we enjoyed, albeit guiltily, the exploits of the snotty popular girls. But I think that such good stories are not necessarily good books. All good stories have power - as Colin says in the book, they become what happened. And I do ( Read more... )

I was sitting back. I was listening. And I was hearing something about her and about windows and mirrors. Chuck Parson was a person. Like me. Margo Roth Spiegelman was a person, too. And I had never quite thought of her that way, not really; it was a failure of all my previous imaginings... I had been imagining her without listening, without ( Read more... )

"What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?" (An Abundance of Katherines)

"If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all." (Paper Towns)

...And one day I mentioned to Ilene [Cooper] that I wanted to write a book. She said the idea sounded promising, although I doubt she figured she’d one day have to excuse herself from a committee over it. Ilene gave me a deadline: April 15, 2001.

When that deadline passed, I’d written ten horrible pages. I’d read you a selection from those ( Read more... )