I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.

What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.

Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.

You know, maybe that's all anybody wants, is to be useful. And have somebody else notice it.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

Some ghosts or felt presences may simply be the essence of another living person projected outward while sleeping.

I hope I never figure out who broke your heart and if I do, if I do. I'd spend all night losing sleep. I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind. Well I'd spend the night and I'd lose my mind.

Killing flowers for our own happiness is a wrong attitude, it is a wrong culture! We must change this attitude and abolish this culture! Let the flowers live!

My day-to-day local issues are rooted in an underlying fear of death.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

I was born singing. Most babies cry, I sang an aria.

The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.

Christianity is based on a book. It centers in a Person. It expresses itself in a message. It authenticates itself in an experience.

I agree that someone falling down is really funny, and I can go on YouTube and watch people falling. It makes me laugh.

Progress grows out of motion.