We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

The only way to retrieve a secret,once known, is to replace it with a lie.

I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.

Into the the air, into the earth, into the fire, I am with you.

When you really know someone, you can't hate him.

I have never resisted the lord in my life, and I never will. But I'm not so hungry for dialogue with him that I have to make up his part as well as my own.

The most noble title any child can have, Demosthenes wrote, is Third.