“I think Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child is one of the books read by nearly every therapist. Everyone's jaw drops when they read Miller's dead-on description of why we became therapists. (...) I wish more people were familiar with her work.”

“If people know what you've read, they know who you are...”

“The world makes room for passionate people.”

“Pablo Neruda's poems tramped through the mud [with the fieldworker]...knocked at the doors of mansions...sat at the table of the baker...The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers...The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand. The books traveled over fences. and bridges. and across borders. soaring from continent to continent. until he had passed thousands of gifts through a hole in the fence to a multitude of people in every corner of the world.”

“I wish to God I could talk to her the way she wants me to, besides forever making her guess what I’m thinking. Why can’t I find the words?”

“I always get muscle aches in my eyes after a few hours of reading," she said. "Doesn't matter what. The closeness does it. All these words in your face, one at a time and filling your periphery. I love reading, but there's a limit."There are times," she went on, "when I don't leave my apartment for days. I read for hours without a break and feel like all I want to do is stand in a field and look as far as I can in any direction. I want a view, but I don't want to see anything. I just want something like an eye stretch.""Why not just shut your eyes?" I asked. "What's the difference?""Closing my eyes is too much like nearness, like reading. It's black and it's in your face, sort of crowding you. Gazing down a prairie road stretches me and the muscles in my eyes. I don't necessarily want to see anything. Just look out.”

“In a world were everyone is different, what can we call normal?”