And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.

Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind's eye and smell it with your mind's nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you're fairly young, I think, or else it's very difficult to read for pleasure later on.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

I went on foot because I still had feet to carry me.