Hearts in Atlantis

Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.

Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn’t a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.

Come to a book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it, and draw your own map.... A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it.

And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.

Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.

A change is as good as a rest.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

Hearts are tough, Most times they don't break. Most times they are only bend

You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn’t question knowing.

It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.

What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn't be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

The redness was going out of the light now, the remains of the day were a fading pink, the color of wild roses.

There are also books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

Good books are for consideration after, too.

Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.

What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.

Actually, I think living's the worst habit.

Sometimes you think you can see around corners, and maybe you can.

Say whatever you want about Stoke Jones, you could depend on him to put a little f/u into your day.

College is always a time of change, I guess, the last major convulsion of childhood,

Hearts are tough. Most times they don't break. Most times they only bend.