Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.

I tried.Can't do it.Brain's empty.

I don't want tobecause boysdon't write poetry.Girls do.

So much dependsupona blue carsplattered with mudspeeding down the road.

I love the way that each book—any book—is its own journey. You open it, and off you go….

What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.

It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.

I had not said anything about what had happened the day before—about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don't know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

Mrs. Mudkin closed her eyes. "We should pray.""I ain't praying," Crazy Cora said. Mrs. Mudkin said, "Lord, please bless---""I ain't praying.""--this land and the people who--""I ain't praying.""--have toiled on this earth--""Stop that praying.""I can pray if I want to.""Then be quiet about it.

Lizzie said that if you imagined you were standing on the moon, looking down on the earth, you wouldn't be able to see the itty-bitty people racing around worrying you wouldn't see the barn falling in or the cow stuck in the pond; you wouldn't see the mean Granger kids squirting mustard on your white dress. You would see the most beautiful blue oceans and green lands, and the whole earth would look like a giant blue-and-green marble floating in the sky. Your worries would seem so small, maybe invisible.

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.

I was wishing I was invisible. Outside, the leaves were falling to the ground, and I was infinitely sad, sad down to my bones. I was sad for Phoebe and her parents and Prudence and Mike, sad for the leaves that were dying, and sad for myself, for something I had lost.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.

What's important is the ambition that results from our weakness.

It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.

The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.