A reading major, that's what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.

A girl lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way.

“A quality muffin is just a cupcake without frosting.”

Sometimes he feels he has lost his own story. Fallen out of its pages and landed here, in between, but he remains in his story. He cannot leave it no matter how he tries.

Apparently even strange covert organizations have interns that get stuck with the lousy shifts.

“Cute," Dorian says to himself, reading the text over the door.
"What does it say?" Zachary asks.
"Know Thyself," Dorian says. "Mirabel is fond of embellishment, I'm amazed she had the time in this weather."
"That's half the Rawlins family motto," Zachary says.
"What's the other half?"
"And Learn to Suffer."
"Maybe you should look into changing that part," Dorian says.

“Everyone wants the stars. Everyone wishes to grasp that which exists out of reach. To hold the extraordinary in their hands and keep the remarkable in their pockets.”

“As I said, I do not care for stars. Stars are made of spite and regret.”

“He told you his name is Dorian? How Oscar Wilde indulgent of him, I thought he was bad enough with his drama eyebrows and his sulking. He said I should call him Mister Smith, he must like you better.”

He couldn't have made up this much detail on a person. Imaginary ladies can't order coffee at Starbucks, probably.

There were many seers in neighboring lands who were blind and saw in ways that others could not though they could not use their eyes.
The local seer was merely nearsighted.

A meow behind him interrupts his wondering. Zachary turns to find a Persian cat staring at him, its squished face contorted in a skeptical glare.
"What's your problem?" he asks the cat.
"Meooorwrrrorr," the cat says in a hybrid meow-growl implying that it has so many problems it does not even know where to begin.
"I hear you," Zachary says.

Zachary glances over his shoulder and the cat is following him but when he looks it stops and licks a paw nonchalantly as though it is not following him at all and just happens to be heading in the same direction.

Only a single cat notices them in this moment and though the cat recognizes this mistake for what it is he does not interfere. It is not the way of cats to interfere with fate.

There are so many pieces to a person. So many small stories and so few opportunities to read them. I would like to look at you seems like such an awkward request.

"Strange, isn't it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are."

"I need you to know that what I feel for you is real. Because I think you feel the same. I have lost a lot of things and I don't want to lose this, too."

"Move through this," Simon advises him. "Let it move through you and then let it go."

"We are the stars," he answers, as though it is the most obvious of facts afloat in a sea of metaphors and misdirections. "We are all stardust and stories."

"She said I'd have two sons. I had Zachary and for years afterward I thought maybe she was just bad at math, or maybe he was twins for a moment before he was born and then not, but then I figured it out and I should have figured it out sooner. I know he'll be back because I haven't met my son-in-law yet."

This person is a place Zachary could lose himself in, and never wish to be found.