“She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man.”

“She knew she could answer it. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other even when every step hurt. And she knew there was pain in the journey, but there was also great beauty. She’d seen it standing on rooftops and in green eyes and in the smallest, ugliest rock. She would find the answer.”

“Tamani?" she asked, even though she knew this was the wrong time. "How is a plant supposed to beat a superstrong troll?”

“She never said, "No, don't buy that trash," or "Pick a real book." She knew they were all real books. This is how great a librarian she was. And how great a mom.”

“At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being.But to write! She discovered that was something else again.”

“She may not be able to teach the baby how to cook, but she could teach the child how to shoot a gun and how to disarm a man when being attacked with a knife. You never knew when those things could come in handy.”