We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.

This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

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

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.

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.