""Perhaps the greatest magic of the human spirit is the ability to laugh, at ourselves, at each other, and at our sometimes hopeless situation. Laughter normalized our lives""
— Torey Hayden

"It's a hard life sometimes and the biggest temptation is to let how hard it is be an excuse to weaken"
— Walter Dean Myers (Scorpions)

"There are depths to the human soul that should not be fathomed."
— Ann Rinaldi

"Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around."
— E.L. Konigsburg (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler)

"Remembering is a great invention of the mind."
— Rodman Philbrick (Freak the Mighty)

"...motherhood should be like driving a car -- you should have to pass a test before you can do it legally."
— Joan Bauer (Hope Was Here)

"But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Sometimes you've got to shout the truth and wake people up."
— Joan Bauer (Stand Tall)

"Like my grandmother always said, 'you never know the blessings that come from suffering."
— Joan Bauer (Rules of the Road)

"You've got to love yourself with all your short comings, and you've got to love the world no matter how bad it gets."
— Joan Bauer (Hope Was Here)

"Memory is the happiness of being alone."
— Lois Lowry (Anastasia Krupnik)

"It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. The same stones shaken, no longer made the same design."
— Betsy Byars (The Summers Of The Swans)

"It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it."
— Robert Cormier (The Chocolate War)

"The thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but there's a view from top every time when you finally get there."
— Nancy Garden (Annie on My Mind)

"It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks."
— Robert Cormier (Heroes)

"Sometimes it take courage to leave."
— Ann Rinaldi (The Staircase)

"Staring down hard truth takes guts."
— Joan Bauer (Hope Was Here)

"My father always told me that in this world we are going to make a truckload of mistakes, but the best mistake we can ever make is to err on the side of mercy"
— Joan Bauer (Best Foot Forward)

"No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into it's system of laws."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"Let me say the good are often punished unfairly."
— Ann Rinaldi (The Staircase)

"Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of everything, even pain."
— Rodman Philbrick (Freak the Mighty)

"You cannot measure the loss of a human life. It's all the things a person was, all their dreams, all the people who loved them, all they hoped to be and could give back to the world."
— Joan Bauer (Stand Tall)

"...racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at."
— Chris Crutcher (Whale Talk)

"Sometimes when things get hard, we tend to set our sights on what's hard, that difficult thing that keeps us upset, and we turn our back on our strengths. "
— Walter Dean Myers (Scorpions)

"They marched. Not for themselves. They marched to remember the ones who didn't make it back. They marched because seeing so much loss can teach you about life. they marched because we're all fighting a war whether we know it or not...a war for our minds and souls and what we believe in."
— Joan Bauer (Stand Tall)

"The problem with the heart is how it can have so many opposite feelings coursing through it all at the same time. It's really an inconsistent thing- appreciating something one minute and hating it the next. "
— Joan Bauer (Best Foot Forward)

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
— Joyce Carol Oates

"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)

"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

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

"Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them."
— Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind)