My bookshelves remind me of where I’ve been, who I am, and what it’s taken to get here.

The world is vast and I'm unsure of how it works, but this comic is mine, and that's enough.

I've learned to endure and find humor in the face of rejection, and this has brought me closer to mastering the art of failure.

The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me sad and afraid. Sad because we're unable to appreciate her work if we can't see how she is just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to be forgotten.

Stone's work reads as if it were composed to the tune of clanging blacksmiths and left to cool under the stars somewhere far from land. This is the conundrum of good writing. It can take you anywhere.

In 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus: A greeting card and a blank envelope. The card has a cartoon king on the cover and inside it says, “You rule!” There is nothing else written anywhere.

My grad school mentor, the brooding and kind-hearted author David Plante, would sometimes refer to unsuccessful books as “one more for the river.” As a student in his twenties with a chartless ocean of writing challenges ahead, this metaphor made me uneasy because I so desperately wanted to arrive somewhere with my work.

You cannot remove a book from the List until you’ve read it entirely—because until the last paragraph, anything can happen.