“How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?”

“...it's stupid to be that way, so easily hurt; it's better to be like a plank of wood, an emotional mule. It's best not to feel,...best to have your nerve endings cauterized.”

“Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.”

“More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.”

“My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.”

“Life is lived on the inside. What's outside doesn't matter.”

“She is not a musical girl nor, intrinsically, a joyful girl; but the music of the four Swedes shook something awake inside her, and when she heard it she felt airborne and strong.”