“I walked to the bookcase and examined the storybooks inside. As a girl, I had dreamed of having stacks of books at my disposal--stories to get lost in, other worlds to live in when mine was so bleak.”

“I've come to realize that you can fight a lot of things in life, but you can't help who you love. You can't change who your heart chooses. I'm afraid that very fact will be the greatest tragedy of ...”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”

“When the people whom we love the most leave us, we start learning to live with the shadows they have left inside us.”

“The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.”

“It's quiet in the car, in a good way for once. No words, no music. Silence seems right. I roll down the windows and lean my head against the door frame, listening to the wind rush by and smelling t...”