Laurie Frankel: "Parenting always involves this balance..."

 "No matter the issue, parenting always involves this balance between what you know, what you guess, what you fear, and what you imagine. You're never certain, even (maybe especially) about the big deals, the huge, important ones with all the ramifications and repercussions. But alas, no one can make these decisions, or deal with their consequences, but you."

- from This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel (author's note)

Laurie Frankel: "We've always been living a fairy tale..."

 "We've always been living a fairy tale... From the moment we met. From the moments before we met. we have this perfect love story. we have this love story that feels like a fairy tale and must be because how else to explain something so magical? But the problem with fairy tales is that they end, and quickly too. The lead-up is everything. Then you get transformation, love, and happily-ever-after all in one breath. That story's nice, but it's not big enough to hold us. There's no room for the hard parts. There's no room for the transformations and the loves that come next and next and next. You know what's even better than happy endings? Happy middles. All the happy with none of the finality. All the happy with room enough to grow."

- from This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Laurie Frankel: "Secrets lead to panic..."

 "Secrets lead to panic... You get to thinking you're the only one there is who's like you, who's both and neither and betwixt, who forges a path every day between selves, but that's not so. When you're along keeping secrets, you get fear. When you tell, you get magic. Twice. (Twice?) You find out you're not alone. And so does everyone else. That's how everything gets better. You share your secret, and you change the world."

- from This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel

Laurie Frankel: "... and if they could not entirely plan..."

 "... and if they could not entirely plan for who she might be two and ten and twenty years from now, they didn't need to. They could make hard decisions, together, when it was time to decide, and in the meantime, they could embrace what was now and what was good. They could be mindful of what was hard for everyone... the trouble all humans in the whole world had knowing who they were and what they needed and what would help the mysterious, unknowable, miraculous beings in their care."

- from This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel

"Success is not a..."

"Success is not a goal, it is a byproduct."

-Coach Taylor, Friday Night Nights

Edgar Degas: "Art is not what..."

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

—Edgar Degas

Beecher: "Greatness lies not in..."

"Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right using of strength... he is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts."

- Henry Ward Beecher

William Arthur Ward: "Do more..."

Do more than belong: participate.
Do more than care: help.
Do more than believe: practice.
Do more than be fair: be kind.
Do more than forgive: forget.
Do more than dream: work.

- William Arthur Ward

Juan Ramon Jimenez: "If they give you..."

"If they give you ruled paper,
write the other way."

- Juan Ramon Jimenez, Spanish poet

Ray Bradbury: "There is more than one way..."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. ... In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book."

- Ray Bradbury, a personal note on censorship in his Coda to Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "There was a silly damn bird..."

"There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury: "Everyone must leave something behind..."

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built of a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451