The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

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

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date--one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.