"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."
- Andrew Wiggin"
— Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead)

"To reach out to you when I'm in need, and to try to be here for you when you need me back. And to feel such tenderness when I look at you that I want to stand between you and all the world: and yet also to lift you up and carry you above the strong currents of life; and at the same time, I would be glad to stand always like this, at a distance, watching you, the beauty of you."
— Orson Scott-Card, Children of the Mind

"Wisest is she who knows she does not know."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

"I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig--or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

"You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand."
— Geraldine Brooks (People of the Book)

"I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever."
— Amy Tan

"Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that's like saying you can never change your fate. Isn't that true?"
— Amy Tan (The Hundred Secret Senses)

"There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
— C.S. Lewis

"You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
— C.S. Lewis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne