I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and, very soon, I slept.

Books were safer than other people anyway.

Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.

Words save our lives, sometimes.

You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.

...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.

How grand is victory but how dear!

People don't pay much attention to you when you are second best. I wanted to see what it felt like to be number one.

I just try to concentrate on concentrating.

Voles-tu, mon petit papillon.” Illium laughed at Galen’s instruction to “fly, little butterfly

The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.

It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality.

For you see, each day I love you more. Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.

I do feel ashamed of having participated to the slightest even as a tool in those dark days. But I was obliged to serve the state to which I had taken an oath. It was a tragic fate.