“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

“When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”

“Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.”

“Sometimes I think that the truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk towards truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.”

“Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.”

“Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.”

“I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.”