I have very little patience with children.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.

Books don't harm kids; they arm them.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

He was the second snowman to be melting away before her eyes, only this one was different. It was a paradox. The colder he became, the more he melted.

My efforts in Congress are guided by the belief that environmental preservation and restoration are a critical part of the legacy we leave to future generations.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.

Think with awe on the slow and quiet power of time.

Only lies offend me, never honest counsel.

And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.

You are not the mistakes of your past, but the resources and capabilities that you have gleaned from your past.

Our circumstances will continually change. It is out of our control. It is more important to change our attitude, which we have control of.

After that I didn't listen to music as much because '70s music just wasn't... I remember all the songs, but it wasn't because I was into them, you know what I mean?

Many who later lost faith in Fidel Castro can remember how they once admired the man who needed just a dozen men to launch the Cuban revolution.