"[D]eath is like that: people are alive until they die."

"[G]ood video games build into their very designs good learning principles and ... we should use these principles, with or without games, in schools, workplaces, and other learning sites."

"[W]e no more become bad thinking of badness than we become triangular by thinking about triangles."

"After all, if children don't make you see things differently - first bringing them into the world and then watching them go out into it - then God help you."

"'Alas!' she said, 'and had I lain in thine arms an hundred times, or an hundred times an hundred, should not the world be barren to me, wert thou gone from it, and that could never more be?'"

"All myths and deities are tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?"

"At ordinary times, most human beings are wearisomely ordinary; depressingly banal in appearance and deadly boring in their conversation. However, at certain moments, by some peculiar, almost supernatural, process their normal triviality can be transformed into something so weird and wonderful that no feline scholar of their species can afford to miss any occasion when that transformation seems likely to take place."

"But it seems that reality compels you to live properly when you live in the real world."

"Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their wastes and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'save us!'.... and I'll look down and whisper 'no'. "

"He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even on Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thought - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness."

"How true it is that bitter experience yields fond memories!"

"I am almost inclined to set up as canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story."

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

"I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things."

"I did not cry any more. There was no point in tears. One of the other boys whimpered from time to time, though. Desperation takes some getting used to."

"Look at me, I said. I am a Lost Boy of Sudan. I have seen my share of death. When I lived in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, the hyenas came at night to feed on the bodies of the friends I had buried during the day. I have seen my village burned by armed invaders. I have been so hungry and thirsty in the dusty plains of Africa that I consumed things I would rather forget. I spent many nights wondering whether my family was alive or dead. I have crossed a crocodile-infested river while being shelled and shot at. I have walked until I thought I could walk no more and surely would die."

"I thought of the first sentence as a kind of semantic womb stuffed with the busy embryos of unwritten pages, brilliant little nuggets of genius practically panting to be born."

"In a way, it's nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong. For instance, when you're walking away from a bus that's just been attacked by monster hags and blown up by lightning, and it's raining on top of everything else, most people might think that's just really bad luck; when you're a half-blood, you understand that some divine force really is trying to mess up your day."

"Maybe thou art seeking for what is not. Or maybe thou shalt seek and shalt find, and there may be naught in what thou findest, whereof to give thee such gifts as are meet for thy faithfulness and valiancy. But in thine home shouldst thou have all gifts which thou mayest desire."

"Nobody knows everything - they shouldn't think they do."

"'That's the way,' said Sancho, 'I've heard it said in sermons, we should love Our Lord: for Himself alone, not because we hope for glory or are afraid of punishment. But I'd rather love and serve Him for what He can do.'"

"The Jews were the first people to break out of this circle, to find a new way of thinking and experiencing, a new way of understanding and feeling the world, so much so that it may be said with some justice that theirs is the only new idea that human beings have ever had."

"We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact - new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice - are the gifts of the Jews."

"There seems to be no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre."

"There was no end to his patience and endurance. He played day and night, his obsession somewhat disquieting. It was less as if he were playing to dispel gloom or beguile tedium than as if he were giving himself up to the fangs of gaming devils."