"Going back to school is like going back in time. Immediately, for better or for worse, you must give up a little piece of your autonomy in order to become part of the group. And every group, of course, has its hierarchies and rules- spoken and unspoken. It is like learning to live once again in a family- which, of course, is the setting where all learning begins."
— Alice Steinbach (Without Reservations)

"No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace -- in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons."
— Herodotus

"[t]he child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing things too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination."
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grow in Brooklyn

"look at everything as though you are seeing it either for the first or last time, then your time on earth will be filled with glory"
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

"People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

""This could be a whole life," she thought. "You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this...""
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"I want to live for something. I don't want to live to get charity food to give me enough strength to go back to get more charity food."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

""Forgiveness is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.""
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

""Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way," said Katie.

"Aw, somebody ought to cut that tree down, the homely thing," said the midwife.

"If there was only one tree like that in the whole world, you would think it was beautiful," said Katie. "But because there are so many, you just can't see how beautiful it really is. Look at those children." She pointed to a swarm of dirty children playing in the gutter. "You could take any one of them and wash him good and dress him up and sit him in a fine house and you would think he was beautiful.""
— Betty Smith

"When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories."
— Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)

"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
— Dr. Seuss (The Lorax)

"But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses."
— Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)

"Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."
— Richard Dawkins

"We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls."
— Bill Bryson

"Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city."
— Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)

"Those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter. "
— Dr Seuss

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

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)