It can connect us to memories. It can influence our mood and our responses to problems we might face.

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.

Thoughts need words. Words need a voice.

Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes-each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.

Teachers must be celebrated for moving civilization from ignorance to enlightenment, from apathy to responsibility.

Without the local library in my neighborhood, I don’t think I would have grown up to be a writer or a teacher.

I believe in me. And my family does. And Mrs. V. It's the rest of the world I'm not so sure of.

She talked to me like I was just like any other student, not a kid in a wheelchair.

[A] person is so much more than the name of a diagnosis on a chart.

Do not let anyone stop you from succeding

By the way, there is nothing cute about a pink wheelchair. Pink doesn't change a thing.

Pain in your past will become power in your future. So make suffering essential.

I can always pray to God with confidence because my righteous state is a gift given through grace in faith on the cross by Jesus!

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

You're definitely a different person at different stages in your life.

He is like some sherry-crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver at roulette, and who now decides to double up by betting the house as well.

Music is just a word for something we love largely because it consists of things that words can't express. Likewise, the heart is just a word for something in us that music sometimes touches.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.

You gotta be willing to fail...if you're afraid of failing, you won't get very far.

As a kid, I might have been psycho, I guess, but I used to throw golf balls in the trees and try and somehow make par from them. I thought that was fun.