A place ain't a place without a bookstore, - Gabrielle Zevin

Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit. Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. Can you believe our luck? Max said. We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.

It is lucky, she thinks, that we don't feel all the love inside us every moment. We couldn't breathe or walk or eat. It is lucky that it just flares up every now and again then resolves itself into a manageable dormancy.

The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don't make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you're always good, the story will be very short.