“All around me, grown-up voices called out, "Amen!" as if the word was a hall pass into Heaven.”

“All around the castle, a briary hedge began to grow, with thorns as sharp as barbs.”

“Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the ones that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.”

“Touch magic. Pass it on.”

“How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another.”

“Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.”

“And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.”