"Is that why you've been pushing me away? Because of how you look? [...] I waited for you my whole life. Yearned for you my whole life. After Tersa told me you were coming, I spent seven hundred years searching for you[....] I never gave a damn what you looked like--tall, short, fat, thin, plain, beautiful, ugly. Why would I care about what you looked like? The flesh was the shell that housed the glory[....] Even if I couldn't be your physical lover, there are other ways to be a lover and I know them all. So don't stand there and tell me how you feel depends on how you look!"
— Anne Bishop (Dreams Made Flesh)

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

"If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!"
— Shel Silverstein

"That which yields is not always weak."
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart)

"Footnote: In 1998, a woman in Saline, Michigan received a patent for a Decorative Penile Wrap...The patent included three pages of drawings, including a penis wearing a ghost outfit, another in the robes of the Grim Reaper, and one dressed up to look like a snowman. "
— Mary Roach

""Worry lives a long way from rational thought."---Self"
— Mary Roach

"This scene may disturb you, so you have to pay attention."
— Zane

"’... Why can’t everyone see them? Why did colors disappear?’
The Giver shrugged. ‘Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness... We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.’"
— Lois Lowry (The Giver)

"The truth will make you odd."
— Judy Blume

"What is normal? Normal is only ordinary; mediocre. Life belongs to the rare, exceptional individual who dares to be different."
— V.C. Andrews

"I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. "
— Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game)

"She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good."
— Orson Scott Card (Children of the Mind)