When you allow people to do what they wish, then that is what they do. They stop doing the things they need to do.

The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

There is room in history for all of us.

She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.

I've also long since realized that the way to really engage children is to give out prizes; it's amazing how it concentrates their minds.

When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope.