If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

What I have come to believe is that joy is the twin sister of gratitude. I am most joyful when I am most grateful.

We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.

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.

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

Teachers have almost stopped reading aloud to their classes because of the pressure of testing and tight curricula, but it is the books we read together and talk about together that bring us closer together.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.