Life was an impenetrable mystery cloaked in babble.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

And what movies we saw! All the actors and actresses whose photographs I collected, with their look of eternity! Their radiance, their eyes, their faces, their voices, the suavity of their movements! Their clothes! Even in prison movies, the stars shone in their prison clothes as if tailors had accompanied them in their downfall.

People steal into one's consciousness and occupy what seems, in retrospect, to have been their place all along.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Teachers inspire the smallest hearts to grow big enough to change the world.

we are, in this country, more open to new ideas. But we are also, it seems to me, more inclined to hail the new as absolute truth - until the next new comes along.