I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn’t.

She told him in a dozen ways, of which the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be all right.

When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality.

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?

A month after their wedding, he wrote to her, ‘I shall always love you as if I were on a honeymoon. I never knew before what it was really to love anyone. Isn’t it strange that something inside told me what the deepest want of my life was the very first time I met you? I didn’t change because it was right.’

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and won’t let you be anything less. They see the potential of you. They see endless possibilities. And through their eyes, you start to see yourself the same way. As someone who matters. As someone who can make a difference in this world.