“I do not know everything; still many things I understand.”

“I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.”

“Progo,' Meg asked. 'You memorized the names of all the stars - how many are there?'How many? Great heavens, earthling. I haven't the faintest idea.'But you said your last assignment was to memorize the names of all of them.'I did. All the stars in all the galaxies. And that's a great many.'But how many?'What difference does it make? I know their names. I don't know how many there are. It's their names that matter.”

“But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”

“We do not know what things look like. We know what things are like. It must be a very limiting thing,this seeing. -Aunt Beast”

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

“We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.”