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.

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

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

You'll see some bad things, but if you didn't see them, they'd still be happening.

Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

Life is all getting used to what you're not used to.

Families hold each other in an iron grip of definition. One must break the grip, somehow.