She was riding a bear! And the Aurora was swaying above them in golden arcs and loops, and all around was the bitter Arctic cold and the immense silence of the North.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.

The only person you can fiercely hate is the person you have loved once fiercely, with your whole heart.

Charity is to will and do what is just and right in every transaction.

I’m afraid to close my eyes, I’m afraid to open them

There is nothing you can control about love.

You have to act and act now.

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself.

No psychological grid works, because if you try to place every personality in one particular grid then you'd need about 4 billion grids because we are all so unique.

Some people, when they die, leave so much life behind that we wonder how they did it.

Desire is proof of the availability.

There is nothing you can do to assuage your conscience when you commit sins. Crime is a spiritual assault on the soul.