The Rent Collector

by Camron Wright

I haven’t yet grasped that earning enough money to buy food on the very day we eat it isn’t an adventure embraced by the world.

the hope of tomorrow is traded to satisfy the hunger of today.

realized someone would be sorting through their trash, would they be more careful in what they

I don’t expect reading to make his body well. But I hope reading will give him something to look forward to, a reason to fight. I want to believe reading will fill him with courage.”

If you want to resurrect hope, doing is the most important. Can you do these things?”

Perhaps I should have given my brain more time when planning my strategy in the dump.

It helps me to remember that even though something is broken, it can still serve a purpose.

Sometimes broken things deserve to be repaired.

To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together—and, quite frankly, they often don’t get along.”

ready. Everyone loves adventure, Sang Ly, when they know how the story ends. In life, however, our own endings are never as perfect.”

If you don’t learn from a story’s message, if you gloss over or dismiss it—even if it’s a message with which you don’t agree—then you have wasted not only your time but the writer’s time as well.

“Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside—and even if you find them all, if you don’t enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said, ‘They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.’ ”

“Learning is an affair that takes a lifetime. Just be patient.

Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow.

Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

“If you are certain you are facing evil,” she says, “and not ignorance, you must, if you can, destroy it before it destroys you!”

“Fight ignorance with words. Fight evil with your knife. Tell your husband, Ki, that he is right.”

“I just know the two added words cause me to look at the ordinary sentences differently. And quite honestly, I find that to be magical!”

Buddha said, ‘Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.’

It seems, quite simply, that as human beings, we are born to hope.”

Stories teach us to not give up hope because there are times in our own journey when we mustn’t give up hope. They teach endurance because in our lives we are meant to endure. They carry messages that are older than the words themselves, messages that reach beyond the page.”