"Sometimes when you pick up your child you can feel the map of your own bones beneath your hands, or smell the scent of your skin in the nape of his neck. This is the most extraordinary thing about motherhood - finding a piece of yourself separate and apart that all the same you could not live without."
— Jodi Picoult (Perfect Match)

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."
— Emilie Buchwald

""When your children are very young it is impossible to imagine a life where they will not live with you, where you will not see them every day or know what they are doing. As they grow up, you gradually untangle your 'self' from their 'selves' until the day arrives when you look at your child and realize the role you play in their life is no longer a central one. It's hard to recognize that your child is independent, but it's also incredibly liberating."
-- from Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story"
— Maureen Wheeler

"...but the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three on them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in a hurry to get on to the next things: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less."
— Anna Quindlen

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
— Anna Quindlen

"That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves"
— Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)

"To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter everyday. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to."
— Garth Stein

"When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside."
— Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed)

"The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have. "
— Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough"
— Mae West

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
— Apple Computer Inc.

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
— Bessie Anderson Stanley

"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"...the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"I wondered why I hadn't loved that day more, why I hadn't savored every bit of it...why I hadn't known how good it was to live so normally, so everyday. But you only know that, I suppose, after it's not normal and every day any longer."
— Anna Quindlen (One True Thing: A Novel)

"Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live."
— Anna Quindlen (A Short Guide to a Happy Life)

"To be in your children's memories tomorrow,
You have to be in their lives today."
— Barbara Johnson

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."
— Mitch Albom

"Be compassionate," Morrie whispered. And take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place."

He took a breath, then added his mantra: "Love each other or die."
— Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson)

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
— Steve Jobs

"Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it."
— Mother Teresa

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung..."
— Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)

"Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard and really amazing is to give up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."
— Anna Quindlen

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself...
You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams."
— Khalil Gibran

"Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are."
— Isabel Allende

"I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them."
— Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader)

"There are lives I can imagine without children but none of them have the same laughter & noise. "
— Brian Andreas

"We're more valuable broken."
— Stephanie Kallos

"The broken are not always gathered together,of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies" but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Childeren are killed. Madamen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessy mourned. loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; Over roads new printed with their foot steps,the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities people with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stuberness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. we can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way."
— Stephanie Kallos (Broken for You)

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone."
— Jennifer Weiner

"Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning."
— Jennifer Weiner

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. "
— Barack Obama

"If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all."
— Anna Quindlen