Words worth keeping

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it.

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

Reading brings us unknown friends

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

You're an idiot.""I've never claimed to be otherwise.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

The important thing to you is not how many years in your life, but how much life in your years!

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

My soul will find yours.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.