“Focused men are painfully attractive.”

“Focused men are painfully attractive.”

“A new adaptation of Jane Eyre came out every year, and every year it was exactly the same. An unknown actress would play Jane, and she was usually prettier than she should have been. A very handsome, very brooding, very 'ooh-la-la' man would play Rochester, and Judi Dench would play everyone else.”

“This was not a novel. It was a force of nature. Here, in my hands, was the collective imagination of a million teenage girls. Jane Eyre was one of the most famous novels ever written . . . It was the reason that women today secretly fantasized about mystery, danger, and brooding men. Jane Eyre was a twisted Cinderella story . . .”

“Usually, meaning tends to find you, in the middle of the night, and when you least expect it.”

“I call that creativity," Orville said. "The purpose of literature is to teach you how to THINK, not how to be practical. Learning to discover the connective tissue between seemingly unrelated events is the only way we are equipped to understand patterns in the real world.”

“My father used to say that all protagonists were versions of the author who wrote them—even if it meant the author had to acknowledge a side of himself that he did not know existed. It just required courage.”

“Are there any leading men in your life?""Several, but they're all fictional.”

“I realized that my life of late had consisted of far too much dialogue and not enough exposition. I imagined an angry, bespectacled English teacher slashing his pen through the transcript of my life, wondering how someone could possibly say so much and think so little.”

“Isn't there some truth in all fiction?" "There's some fiction in all truth too.”

“The great reward given to intelligent people is that they can invent all the rules and equate any dissent with stupidity.”