“How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.”

“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”

“Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.”

“Sometimes the signs and signals of the non-language speaking world are not very clear. Then we have to walk in trust, move forward step by small step, until we are sure of the proper path.”

“There are all kinds of writers. The best writers write children's books.”

“Artists paint pictures. The best artists paint pictures for children's books.”