“The lessons she'd been forced to learn were dry spare things, the facts without the sense of them, given in the simplest of language, as if words might disguise the truth or (worse) bring it to life.”

“Was that what Nell had done, too? Forsaken the life and the family she'd been given, to focus instead on the one she'd been without.”

“Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.”

“The most difficult thing to explain in life is the simplest truth called love”

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”

“Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.”