“if you want to convince children of the power of books, don’t tell them stories are good. Tell them a good story.”

“That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you'll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guides, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such "strategies" as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody's favorite thing: homework.”

“People are so complex. They want to hear the truth, but they want you to lie to them.”

“I couldn't bring this sorrow home. Couldn't tell my wife. Wouldn't tell my children. As my friend Edward Dee says, we live in the worst twenty minutes of someone else's life. So I leave it behind . . . where it happened . . . where it belongs . . . not in my house.”

“In fact, our bodies are never the same--each minute, they undergo changes, even if imperceptible. Eisenstein (2001, 40-41) points out that we have many bodies, which influence our accounts of reality: 'Writing from the body, my body, my different bodies, I have different stories to tell. They are all all of a piece although they are also fragmentary as through each body experience has its own narration (13).”

“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.”

“Life. It’s a funny thing. Some want it, some throw it away. Some cling, some have it stolen from them. It’s terrifying… which is maybe why I was drawn to Fear in the first place.”