Amelia the bright-sider believes it is better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn't share your sensibilities and interests. (It is, right?)… - Gabrielle Zevin

Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.

The words you can't find, you borrow.
We read to know we're not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.