"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"...Atticus, he was real nice...."
"Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. "
— Annie Dillard

"I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them - and then they leap. I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for awhile. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

"Nothing will work unless you do."
— Maya Angelou