“The mirror had no power. The mirror was just a piece of silvered glass; the enchantment was all in me.”

“Libraries are full of ghosts, books being the most haunted things of all.”

“Vulnerability, like he had the power to hurther or pleasure her in a way no other mancould. For the first time, he was uncomfortable with the idea of having complete power over her”

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

“That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.”

“I can’t be Pollyanna all the time. There is a certain risk in what we do. We have the power to make someone’s dream come true, but we also have the power to crush it forever.”

“It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.”