“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.”

“It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.”

“Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.”

“A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.”

“It would take me very far back to tell the story of how I developed my consciousness of the evocative power of mural imagery. These are memories of my adolescence and early youth when I lived enclosed within four walls during the time of war. The suffering of the adults and all the cruel imaginings of my age, abandoned to its own impulses amid all the surrounding catastrophes, were drawn and etched all around me.”

“All these years I've had a story in my mind, the story about us that never really existed. And because of that story, I've kept you framed up on the wall in a little box of nostalgic moonlight.”

“We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves.”

“Our stories are funny because we lived them, and we survived them. The worse the incident was when it was happening, the funnier the story had become to us over the years.”

“Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men.”

“When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.”