Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.