“The child does not begin to fall until she becomes seriously interested in walking, until she actually begins learning. Falling is thus more an indication of learning than a sign of failure.”

“If your children see that you are seeking, they will seek—the finding part is up to God.”

“Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it. Polly B. Berends”

“It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he'd like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us--at least partly--as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, "You don't seem like an American." When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, "Because you listen.”

“I think... girls have a hard time being interesting. It’s actually easier to be famous, or notorious, than it is to be interesting. In our world, girls climb very well until they hit puberty-sexual maturity-and then they begin to fall out of the tree. They start role-playing instead of thinking, flirting instead of learning. They start admiring how smart the boys are-or how athletic or how handsome-instead of concentrating on their own intelligence.”

“She was alone in the stillness of the universe a little while before all the confusion began. It was if she could hear it ticking, check in on the life at the very center of it, its wellspring that everyone somehow knows, before it was covered by noise.”

“We read a lot of books. Children's books mostly, because they're always much more truthful than adult books. And much more entertaining," said Mrs. Bunny.”