When she told me it was her favorite, it suggested to me strange and wonderful things about her character that I had not guessed, dark places that I … - Gabrielle Zevin

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

I myself am mixed race — my mother is Korean and my father is an American Jew — so I've always felt other. But I think what's a little bit amazing about books, again, is the way in which they can sort of transcend that to an extent. And I also wanted the world as I see it — and the world as I see it is a world that is increasingly [filled] with people [of] different ethnicities.

Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own — -the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn't know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don't know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don't know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.

...she doesn't want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows