Library Love Quotes & Sayings

The moment I walk into a bookstore, I remember what I love about them. They are an oasis of intellectual calm. Perhaps it's the potential of all the ideas hidden behind those delicious covers. Or perhaps it's the social reverence for the library-like quiet. You don't yell in a bookstore; you'll piss off the books. — Michael Lopp

I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it. — Camille Paglia

Shara was already an avid reader by then, but she had never realized until that moment what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves ... Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.
She felt overwhelmed. It was
she briefly thinks of herself and Vo, reading together in the library
a lot like being in love for the first time. — Robert Jackson Bennett

Her library is a meeting place for all who love books. They discuss matters of the world and matters of the spirit. — Jeanette Winter

I love the sound of people thinking. — Will Bly

I love e-books. I can carry the complete works of William Shakespeare around with me all the time. Just think about that. Whether I'm on an airplane or wherever. Being able to have a library in your back pocket basically is something I support. — Steve Earle

Sleepless nights, infinite random thoughts, Remembering those moments, he had much to say, an urge to talk to someone, to be cared, to be loved, to be understood !! She was gone by now, And he was lost !! There it was, A white paper note, a pen, and the dark clouds forcing him to spill out !! Yes Words did most of talking, the unsaid words took the paper form .. Strange it was, the way Love was lost somewhere in the Library stacks !! — Douglas Self

For all her faults, it was actually my mom who instilled in me a love of reading, and books, for which I will always be grateful. She's a complete bibliophile, so I've pretty much grown up around libraries and books. — Paula Gruben

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her. — Kathleen Tessaro

We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life. — Dolly Parton

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough ... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. — Doris Lessing

Love is stronger than pain. In the parking lot behind the Dartbridge Library. — Virginia Bergin

In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love. — Jess Walter

Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight. — Baron De Montesquieu

He began reading her eyes more deeply and passionately than the books in the library. — Avijeet Das

Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book's absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathise wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, "I hate, I love", and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. — Virginia Woolf

I was fortunate to attend a school with an excellent library — Syrie James

People think librarians are unromantic, unimaginative. This is not true. We are people whose dreams run in particular ways. Ask a mountain climber what he feels when he sees a mountain; a lion tamer what goes through his mind when he meets a new lion; a doctor confronted with a beautiful malfunctioning body. The idea of a library full of books, the books full of knowledge, fills me with fear and love and courage and endless wonder. — Elizabeth McCracken

I think her Grandmother Hall gave her a great sense of family love, and reassurance. Her grandmother did love her, like her father, unconditionally. And despite the order and the discipline - and home at certain hours and out at certain hours and reading at certain hours - there was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn't censored. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

I am never long, even in the society of her I love, without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library. — Lord Byron

I've always said, stuff the engagement ring! Just build me a really big library. — Emma Watson

She'd dreamed of him. Her imagination, unfettered in her sleep, had featured him. He'd been gloriously naked and her hands had explored the whole of him, delighted to discover that the handsome man was even more magnificent without clothes.
Drumvagen might be set into the Scottish wilderness, but what furnished her with a great deal of knowledge she otherwise might not have had. She listened to the maids discussing their love lives with a frankness they never would have had they known she was eavesdropping. Then, there was the sight of the handsome Scots lads bathing in the sea.
The books she read from Mairi's library had strengthened her imagination, adding details otherwise missing from her personal experience. — Karen Ranney

When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it. — Nathan Myhrvold

It is true, Monsieur," Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, "that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one's self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures. — Rachilde

You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books. — Joanna Trollope

Well, a woman can learn so much from reading their books. Look at it this way: you have the Internet, I have the library," her lips twisted, " ... and bookstores. It really does come in handy." She grinned, revealing beautiful, pearly teeth. "If you ever wanna do something to make me happy, buy me books. I will love you forever." She flashed her gorgeous smile again. — Shanora Williams

I do a lot of research for my books. I can't possibly know all the things I write about and I love learning new things. I spend hours and hours doing research in books, libraries and online. [Once] I traveled to the reservation to get the settings and the flavor of the place down right. — Linda Conrad

I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology. — Mary Kubica

It was true. After our divorce, I'd ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it sounded. Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure little red entry on Hungarian poetry. It was dead silent, no one gave me any dierection, and nothing was where it was supposed to be. — Marisha Pessl

AT first Raoden stayed away from the library, because it reminded him of her.
Then he found himself drawn back to it - because it reminded him of her. — Brandon Sanderson

I have no internet savvy whatsoever, but I love researching things. The Internet is my library ... beyond that, I'm completely intimidated by it. — Drew Barrymore

I think it's really important, and it's a lesson I didn't learn until my late teens: Whatever bands that you love, go find out what bands they love, and what bands turned them on, and then you really start getting into the human aspect of it because the further back you go in time the less technology you had, and consequently the better records you had. There's this incredible library of music thank god. — Brad Wilk

Boys and girls hid in the library stacks or behind the gym and flew at each other with no promise of love or even kindness, tasting one another in clumsly attempts to steal pleasure before they could be hurt or hated. — Laura Whitcomb

One of the reasons I decided to enter this profession," one of the Riot Librarrrians wrote, "was because I'm in love with information, and the library remains one of the few spaces in our lives where information is not a commodity ... There's a subversive element to librarianship that I adore. — Marilyn Johnson

I love you," Kenneth said, with terrible dispassion, "but I would not burn the Library of Alexandria for you"; and Anita, drily sobbing, cried, "You son of a bitch. — Jincy Willett

Oh, Tatiana wouldn't even consider staying here for a moment," Gideon said. "She has fled to the Blackthorns', her in-laws, and good riddance. She is not a stupid girl-in fact, she considers her intelligence to be quite superior-but she is a self-important and vain one, and there is no love lost between her and my brother. And he had been awake for days, mind you. Waiting in that great blasted house, locked out of the library, pounding on the door when no answer came from my father ... "
"You feel protective of him," Sophie observed.
"Of course I do; he is my little brother." He moved forward and brushed a hand over Gabriel's tousled brown hair; the other boy moved and made a restless sound but did not wake. — Cassandra Clare

It was sort of like being in one of those love-and-horror supernatural novels, the kind Mrs. Robinson in the school library sniffily called "tweenager porn." In those books the girls dallied with werewolves, vampires - even zombies - but hardly ever became those things. It was also nice to have a grown man stand up for her, and it didn't hurt that he was handsome, in a scruffy kind of way that reminded her a little of Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy, a show she and Emma Deane secretly watched on Em's computer. — Stephen King

A library, no matter how big or small, is a careful balance of love and responsibility. A machine, if you will, cranked by those who care most about reading. — Kimberly Karalius

I read all the time. I love it. My fantasy would be to be locked into a library. I'd be very, very happy. — Pink

When spring comes, I shall meet you at the Municipal Library, and you will see how much I've learned! You'll be so proud of me and love me so!'
'Oh, Ell, but I do love you! Right now!'
'One can always bear more love,' the Wyverary purred. — Catherynne M Valente

I remember hearing grandpa say that a love for god books was one of the best safeguards a man could have,' began Archie, staring thoughtfully at the fine library before him. — Louisa May Alcott

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university. — John Jakes

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books. — Graham Greene

The library door was thick and none of the ordinary sounds that might have reminded them, might have held them back, could reach them. They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future, — Ian McEwan

As a child I thought that I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen. — Patti Smith

There's so much more to life than finding someone who will want you, or being sad over someone who doesn't. There's a lot of wonderful time to be spent discovering yourself without hoping someone will fall in love with you along the way, and it doesn't need to be painful or empty. You need to fill yourself up with love. Not anyone else. Become a whole being on your own. Go on adventures, fall asleep in the woods with friends, wander around the city at night, sit in a coffee shop on your own, write on bathroom stalls, leave notes in library books, dress up for yourself, give to others, smile a lot. Do all things with love, but don't romanticize life like you can't survive without it. Live for yourself and be happy on your own. It isn't any less beautiful, I promise. — Emery Allen

I love to tell kids that everything in the library is theirs. "We just keep it here for you." One million items that you can have for free! Collection that represents an answer to just about any question you could ask. A bottomless source of stories and entertainments and scholarly works and works of art. — Josh Hanagarne

..all of us who are sealed to the Library are people who have chosen this way of life because we love books. None of us wanted to save worlds. I mean, not that we object to saving worlds..." She shrugged, picking up her teacup again "We want books. We love books. We live with books. — Genevieve Cogman

Want to inspire your kids to read more? Try giving them kids some money to spend just on a book. Take them to a bookstore and let them browse and pick out one book that they will love. Or try going to a local library for a few hours and just let your kids sift through books that interest them. — Melanie Kirk

The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don't. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership. — Niall Williams

You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it. — Ray Bradbury

For no one, in our long decline,So dusty, spiteful and divided,Had quite such pleasant friends as mine,Or loved them half as much as I did. [stanza 3]The library was most inviting:The books upon the crowded shelvesWere mainly of our private writing:We kept a school and taught ourselves. [stanza 15]From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,Theres nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends. [stanza 22]You do retain the song we set,And how it rises, trips and scans?You keep the sacred memory yet,Republicans? Republicans?[stanza 36] — Hilaire Belloc

It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read. — Nancy Pickard

Baseball has the largest library of law and love and custom and ritual, and therefore, in a nation that fundamentally believes it is a nation under law, well, baseball is America's most privileged version of the level field. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

The journey home was made short by Ronan's tales of research on love. He confessed to Katie he was not good at expressing his inner feelings. He adopted the Socratic Method and asked all his friends and family for advice. They proved no help so he enlisted the help of Lovely Lucy Looney, the local librarian. He went and researched love, sex and flirting. He spoke of Lucy's shock on his many visits to the library and his mortification but Katie's love was worth all embarrassment. She was touched by his Herculean efforts and knew he was her soul mate — Annette J. Dunlea

For weeks Octavio returned to the shelter of the trees. The woman would appear as the sun reached midday. She would walk to the edge of the trees, find her chair and drag it to the boat pond. Every Sunday the same chair, the same spot. Every Sunday a book.
He needed only one word to imagine a hundred stories: she -
was a dancer; cooling her feet after a morning of twists and leaps.
was the daughter of a sea captain, remembering her childhood as the toy boats crossed the pond.
was an empress hiding among her subjects, shielding her face with a scarf made from the silk of ten thousand worms. Five thousand green, five thousand blue.
was a teacher, a lover of learning, patient and gentle with her students.
She - was a reader.
He had a library. — C.S. Richardson

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA. — Jessye Norman

I fell in love with books at the Elizabeth Public Library when I was four ... — Judy Blume

I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question. — Alice Hoffman

Nick wanted to meet on campus at Love Library. (That was the actual name; thank you for your donation, Mayor Don Lathrop Love.) — Rainbow Rowell

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book. — Lev Grossman

You should love literature. You should live in the library. Forget about films. — Ray Bradbury

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement. — George Monbiot

I fall in love with any girl who smells of library paste. — Charles M. Schulz

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. — Alberto Manguel

Everybody has a 'gripping stranger' in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it's the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library - a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying 'Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,' you'd follow them. — Douglas Coupland

I'm still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. — Harper Lee

Keep your life simple and stylish and earnest. Do good and donate your time and money to something you care about. Make people laugh. Be frank. Always give people a second chance - but rarely a third. Live light, travel light, and be light. Forget shit and move on. Make everyone you love feel loved. Waste not, want not. Reuse stuff. Stop trying to get a tan and straighten your hair - you're just not made that way. Go to the movies, go to the library, go to the park. Try to make every day feel as close to a vacation as possible. Floss. — Judy Greer

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school. — Ray Bradbury

I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a building. He looked so intense and scary, and I couldn't get that image out of my head. That started building up my love of magic. — David Blaine

Mom and Dad were bibliophiles. Dad shared his father's love of westerns, Mom favored the likes of Zelazny and Heinlein, Howard and Burroughs. We owned several hundred books stored in trunks that comprised our portable library. — Laird Barron

I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there. — Jim Gaffigan

Somehow, even outside the library and our clearing in the woods, we were still in our own world. Everything else could fade away, and he and I would remain, tied together by something I couldn't quite expline. In its simplest term, love. — Rachel Schieffelbein

To: Christian Grey
You've made me cry again.
I love the iPad.
I love the songs.
I love the British Library App.
I love you.
Goodnight.
Ana xx — E.L. James

If the Beast gave me a library like he gave to Belle, I'd marry him too. — Aya Ling

Book lovers love books!" her mother announced. "There's romance about the books- even having them seems to have a kind of excitement."
from Mr. Linden's Library by Walter Dean Myers — Chris Van Allsburg

I had once read, in one of those pre-plague books in the library, that love was bearing witness. That it was the act of watching someone's life, of simply being there to say: you're life is worth seeing. — Anna Carey

The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209) — Dorothy Allison

A library is also a place where love begins. — Rudolfo Anaya

Our lips met hungrily, and his clever artistic hands wrapped around my hips. A sudden buzz from my regular cell phone startled me from the kissing.
"Don't," said Adrian, his eyes ablaze and breathing ragged.
"What if there's a crisis at school?" I asked. "What if Angeline 'accidentally' stole one of the campus buses and drove it into the library?"
"Why would she do that?"
"Are you saying she wouldn't?"
He sighed. "Go check it. — Richelle Mead

I look into your eyes to find the truth. In other dimensions, I found a portal which connects life, logic and nature. It feels the body with knowledge, inspiration, love, and an engraved library of wisdom.
Katia M. S. — Katia M. S.

Love made you admire funny things about a person, like how good she was at remembering to return her library books and at slicing cucumbers very thin. She was a veritable wonder at pulling a splinter out of her foot. — Ann Brashares

I fell in love with reading when I was allowed to choose whatever books I wanted to check out of the library. I was around nine years old when I began choosing my own books in earnest. — Adriana Trigiani

God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at! — J.D. Salinger

There is a little Juliet inside me, hoping I will lock eyes with my Romeo on the other side of a fish tank or through a gap in a library bookcase. Hell, even if it's behind the condiments section in a supermarket. I don't really mind. — Jessica Thompson

Ji-li's deeply moving story should be on the shelf of every person's library. Her courage in the face of adversity and her steadfast loyalty and love for her family are truly inspirational for young and old alike. — Nien Cheng

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.
How would that be? Just how would that be? — Stephen King

It was from a very young age that I fell in love with this wonderful artifact
the turn of the first page is almost like a sacred ritual to me. Whenever I walk into a library, it is never without some degree of reverence. — Lang Leav

Griff had never been the fanciful sort, even as a boy. When he was with Pauline, the world was different. She forced him to see things through fresh eyes. Suddenly his library was the eighth wonder of the world, and Corinthian columns merited blasphemy. A ferry across the Thames was an epic journey, and a kiss . . . a kiss was everything. — Tessa Dare

The curtains were blood-red and drawn. This was not an office. It was a small library, two storeys high, with thin ladders and impractical balconies and an expansive ceiling featuring a gaggle of naked Greeks. It was the sort of library you'd marry a man for. — Catherine Lowell

The library serves as a gathering place for friends who
share the love of books. It further serves as a resource for those who escape the pressure of everyday
life, doing it by losing themselves in the written word. — Kristen Ashley

Some books you never get over, like a first love. Some books that made an enormous impression on you when you were young you are afraid to read again years later, like being sorry you met that former love for coffee, because you couldn't see what you once saw. But there are those few books that can still move you in the old, throbbing way."
"How I got over — Darryl Pinckney

We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation. — Michael Moorcock

And Phoebe and Sebastian went their separate ways, to the blacksmith shop and the library, after several backward glances that weren't coordinated enough to allow either to know that the other one was looking. — Jean Ferris

I have a tingly feeling that I get when there are books all around me. The library! I know it's geeky, but I love it. Just sitting between the shelves of books, reading - it's the safest feeling. — Nick Lake

I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written " Lucy's Room." I kept a place for him, too - a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand - yet, released from that hold and constriction, I know not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host. — Charlotte Bronte

We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets. — Kathy Bates

Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor - lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America. — David Laskin

Libraries are where most of us really fall in love with books, where we can browse and choose on our own. Its really one of the first autonomous things we do, picking the books we want to read. — Kim Boykin

Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library- this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, every reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together. — Curtis Sittenfeld