“ADMIRE means, I really look up to you and the way you are with your cookies. You remind me of what is good and possible in this world.”

“If you want to grow up to be a big, strong pea, you have to eat your candy," Papa Pea would say.”

“To get a true sense of the book, I have to spend a few moments inside. I'll glance at the first couple pages, then flip around to somewhere in the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It's like dating, only with sentences......It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word (tangerine). We're meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know.”

“I am a slow reader, and fast eater; I wish it were the other way around.”

“A good soup attracts chairs. This is an African proverb. I can hear the shuffling and squeaking on the wood floor, the gathering 'round. This, from just five well-chosen words.”

“My brother, who grew up with three sisters, was I won't say how many years old when he finally realized that he did not have to wrap the towel around his chest when he came out of the shower.”

“It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling.”