Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.