Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.

Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people.

habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

I consider fiction a very high-class form of lying. I enjoy and admire it enormously, but I don't think I'm very good at it.

A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention