"Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.)"...

"I think of wall after wall after wall. Green mazes wandering and two people wandering through them. Doorways that lead somewhere good. Skies the exact kind of blue I've been looking for." -- Ed (Graffiti Moon) In Graffiti Moon, by Cath Crowley, the bedraggled streets of Melbourne...

"I told her the story of us. 'It's about the feed,' I said. 'It's about this meg normal guy, who doesn't think about anything until one wacky day, when he meets a dissident with a heart of gold.' I said, 'Set against the backdrop of America in its final days,...

"Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or forget things? Do we spend most of our time running toward or away from our lives? I don't know." -- Cameron Wolfe (from Fighting Ruben Wolfe) I am unable to understand why there are not legions...

"The comfort of knowing" The truth is, as interpreted in the poetic musings and documentations in David Levithan's verse novel, The Realm Of Possibility, the experience of comfort can never be actualized, but will be eternally desired and driven by the agonizing discomfort of the unknown; for...

"How will I ever get out of this labyrinth" - Simon Bolivar Miles Halter, John Green's protagonist in Looking For Alaska, is fascinated by famous and obscure last words and tired of his safe life at home. So, as he leaves for boarding school at Culver Creek...

As avid and passionate readers, we each bear an ever-growing list of books that we know, within, we must read; A personal cannon that strengthens, enriches and validates us as the cultured and smartly cultivated readers we aspire to be. For me, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game has resided on...

The human race has proven to be, all at once, terribly atrocious and profoundly lovely. Unfortunately for Death (the narrator of this story), as one of the major distresses of the job, he is inevitably present for all of the former and VERY little of the latter. Particularly, in Nazi...

What makes up an individual into the person one hopes to be? What components to a person's life are most crucial to this formation of self? To which extent is an understanding or reconciliation of these personal elements required for one to achieve a satiated level of "okayness"? ...

The extraordinary is concieved and delivered, through a little bit of courage and faith, in the otherwise dull and mundane. This is the message in Mr. Zusak's sweet and enormously pleasurable tale of Ed Kennedy, a painfully average nice guy who is suddenly snatched from a life of lazy, self-centered...