“Ripe strawberries hung from the little plants, row after row. They gleamed like baubles, bright and red among the leaves, weighing down their stalks.”

“She slipped Glenn into her bed and then her face hung over Glenn's for one quiet moment, like a moon."Meera doe branagh, Glennora Morgan."The strange words drifted down from her mother's lips, whispered as light as falling snow."What does it mean, Mommy?"Fingertips grazed Glenn's cheek. "It means I love you. It means I'll always love you." She kissed Glenn softly on the forehead, then backed away. "No matter what."She stepped into the bright hallway and closed the door.When Glenn woke the next morning, her mother was gone”

“I need to live like that crooked tree--...that knelt down in the hardest windsbut could not be blasted away.”

“If someone is too tired to give you a smile, leave one of your own, because no one needs a smile as much as those who have none to give.”

“It struck Glenn how their whole life had been made up of such little things.”

“If we're going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of "Little Jesuses" to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.”

“Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system. She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out. 'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school?"If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic structure, the hapless five—they are most likely to be poor or minority students—are bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation.”