NOS4A2

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.

The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.

She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.

Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom.

Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better. That's innocence.

Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.

I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.

You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...

And he paddled away in his douche canoe.

To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.

You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

Aren't you going to tell me I'm not so bad? she asked. Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.

Men, she thought, were one of the world's few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in-slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.

Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.

She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

Vic’s father was badass. Other dads built things. Hers blew shit up and rode away on a Harley, smoking the cigarette he used to light the fuse. Top that.

Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.

She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.