Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.

That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.

When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

The worst of anything she could do to me would be to make me like her. That's why I ran away.

I would say that I'm more moved by melody, even though I love to rap.

Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.

Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal Lust Is meanly selfish; when resisted, cruel; And, like the blast of Pestilential Winds, Taints the sweet bloom of Nature's fairest forms.

We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.

Teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history.

When we want to speak to God, we pray. And when we want Him to speak to us, we search the scriptures.