Maniac Magee was not born in a dump.
Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow.
As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other’s eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.
The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office.
I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn’t care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.
The blanket was there, but it was the boy’s embrace that covered and warmed him.
Every child’s bedroom is as important as a telescope orbiting the planet earth or a philosopher’s study.
Everybody has an angel hiding inside. When you die, your angel comes out. You can die, but not your angel. Your angel never dies.
He doesn’t think. He just does. A nonthinking doer.
In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.
Letter from Mr. B: Why does a back scratch feel better coming from somebody else than if you do it yourself?
I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear it.
It was different with you, Leo. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same.
Let’s just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I’ll be me, today and today and today, and let’s trust the future to tomorrow.
He tapped my chest. ‘Happy is here.’ He tapped his own chest. ‘Here.’ I looked down past my chin. ‘Inside?’ ‘Inside.’ It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.
You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.
Hey, this is it – right now! – the time when you find out who you are and what you can do. And how will you ever know if you don’t try new stuff?
She dreams a lot. She dreams of Ondines and falling maidens and houses burning in the night. But search her dreams all you like and you’ll never find Prince Charming. No knight on a white horse gallops into her dreams to carry her away. When she dreams of love, she dreams of smashed potatoes.
Life is populated with scarecrows – all those people and things that seem so scary and trouble our sleep. Isn’t it nice to know that most of them turn out to be made of nothing but straw?
And smiles to go before I weep, And Smiles to go before I weep.
I’m Sorry are two of the most powerful words in our language, especially when they are not flipped blithely over the shoulder but spoken from the heart. They help restore order, balance, harmony. They reduce pain. They heal broken friendship. If they were medecine, they’d be called a miracle.