If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.