Janet Fitch

"The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart."

Janet Fitch (White Oleander)

Rabindranath Tagore

"The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end."

Rabindranath Tagore

Rachel Carson

"If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our
strength .. "

Rachel Carson (The Sense of Wonder)

Alberto Manguel

"At one magical instant in my early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to me, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. I became a reader."

Alberto Manguel

Ian Rankin

"His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life. "

Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses)

Laurie Halse Anderson

"Another page turns on the calendar, May now, not April. I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. I spin and weave and knit my words until a life starts to take shape. There is no magic cure, no making it all go away. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore. I am thawing."

Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)

Maya Angelou

"The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them."

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou

"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."

Maya Angelou