"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."

"Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time."

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

"Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world."

"Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves."

"I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life."

"Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people."

"Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite"

"There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore."