""Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.""
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"We change our behavior when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing. Consequences give us the pain that motivates us to change."
— Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

"If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you 'do' boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality."
— Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

"The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses."
— Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder)

"When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man."
— Frank Delaney (Ireland: A Novel)

"If getting our kids out into nature is a search for perfection, or is one more chore, then the belief in perfection and the chore defeats the joy. It's a good thing to learn more about nature in order to share this knowledge with children; it's even better if the adult and child learn about nature together. And it's a lot more fun."
— Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder)

"An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world."
— Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder)

"Don't go overboard in praising required behavior: 'We have only done our duty' (Luke 17:10). But do go overboard when your child confesses the truth, repents honestly, takes chances, and loves openly. Praise the developing character in your child as it emerges in active, loving, responsible behavior."
— Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

"Training moments occur when both parents and children do their jobs. The parent's job is to make the rule. The child's job is to break the rule. The parent then corrects and disciplines. The child breaks the rule again, and the parent manages the consequences and empathy that then turn the rule into reality and internal structure for the child."
— Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

"Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears."
— Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

"The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life."
— Betsy Lerner (Forest For The Trees)

"[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul."
— Betsy Lerner (Forest For The Trees)

"He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence."
— Donald Miller (A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life)