Papa!” she whispered. “I have no eyes!”He patted the girl’s hair. She’d fallen into his trap. “With a smile like that, ” Hans Hubermann said, “you don’t need eyes.

A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.

Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.

Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that's where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.

No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.

It was the beginning of the greatest Christmas ever. Little food. No presents. But there was a snowman in their basement.

As always, one of her books was next to her.

If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.

Possibility is spiritual.

You live like comfortable strangers. Like characters in a play.

I don't really believe you are married unless you have children. And people who only have one kid don't really have kids.

Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

If men and women are in chains anywhere in the world, then freedom is endangered everywhere.

When you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything.

To not love ourselves can keep what we want from us.

If the Lord is to be Lord, worship must have priority in our lives. The divine priority is worship first, service second.