When you're writing, at least when I'm writing, I don't think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.

If I'd kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?

So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

Your tribe is out there, you just have to find them.

We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.

There was romance in the unknown, but once a place had been discovered and cataloged and mapped, it was diminished, just another dusty fact in a book, sapped of mystery. So maybe it was better to leave a few spots on the map blank. To let the world keep a little of its magic, rather than forcing it to divulge every last secret. Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.