I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.

He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.

Don't look at me like that, " said Ruza."Like what?""Like I'm a beautiful book you're about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes.

...but one can't be irredeemable who shows reverence for books.

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.

Even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.

If you're afraid of your own dreams, you're welcome here in mine.

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.

Poppy: What makes you think I'm having dinner with you?Jake: Because you can't sit in your room and eat ice cream and chips two nights in a row. You'll get scurvy. You need vitamin C.

You are the center of your life

A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.

If ever we needed to put the Golden Rule into action, it’s with our aging parents.

You cannot barter security for freedom, or freedom for security.

If there is confusion in your head and in your heart, what more do you want! A man who no longer loves and no longer errs should have himself buried straight away.

I said 'It can't go on' and he said 'No, it can't.' Honestly, I don't think I could have mattered less to him by then. But by then, nothing mattered to him.

advocating women's rights and greater opportunity for women in the workplace and in every avenue of public life is inconsistent with an insistence on mother taking care of children and housework.

I am naturally a thin person and I am 5'1" and putting on five or 10 pounds, that looks like a lot on me.

Prayer is the oxygen of the soul.