The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth – love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn’t flowers grow out of dirt?

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went...

You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part – a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty...

He closed the locker quickly so no one would see the damage. For some reason, he felt ashamed.

The cheese stands aloneThe cheese stands aloneHeigh-ho the merry-oThe cheese stands alone

Don’t miss the bus, boy. You’re missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.

I wonder if it’s a special sin to lie to a nun

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine – not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting,...

When he ran, he even loved the pain, the hurt of the running, the burning in his lungs and the spasms that sometimes gripped his calves. He loved it because he knew he could endure...

They don’t actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it’s their thing too.

The Goober was beautiful when he ran. His long arms and legs moved flowingly and flawlessly, his body floating as if his feet weren’t touching the ground. When he ran, he forgot about his acne...

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.