'Do you really like studying?'

Mattia nodded.

'Why?'

'It's the only thing I know how to do,' he said gently. He wanted to tell her that he liked studying because you can do it on your own, because all the things you study are already dead, cold and chewed-over. He wanted to tell her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they leave you time to choose, that they never hurt you and that you can't hurt them either. But he said nothing.

- The Solitude of Prime Numbers, Paolo Giordano

I couldn't put this book down. This is merely one of the passages that struck me. I like it, I think, because he said it gently.