"She calls herself Tallulah, but I know who she really is. A name can’t begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that’s the magic of names, isn’t it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another mind through the simple sorcery of a name."

"And just because she and her uncle were loaded, that didn’t automatically make them useless as human beings."

"Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors. And this I will tell you as well: One cannot seek to uphold honor in a being that has none."

"Watching him, Sara knew that what he said was ninety percent bravado. Still there was nothing wrong with that. Bravery was in knowing the odds and still going against them."

"“Who is he?” she asked. “Or maybe I should be asking what is he?” “I’ve always thought of him as a kind of anima, Jilly said. “A loose bit of myth that got left behind when all the others went on to wherever it is that myths go when we don’t believe in them anymore.”"

"It’s so much easier for most people to relate to a TV set than it is to another person. They get all this data fed into them, but they don’t know what to do with it anymore. When they talk to other people, it’s all surface. How ya doing, what about the weather. The only opinions they have are those that they’ve gotten from people on the TV. They think they’re informed, but all they’re doing is repeating the views of talk show hosts and news commentators."

"There's enough weirdness in the world as it is without having to give it supernatural trappings, don't you think?"

"But while the tale itself, its truth, is of the utmost importance, it is the telling that allows it to be remembered or forgotten. The trueness of the telling is what makes up a storyteller’s craft."

"They’d met three years ago at a record launch party when Hilary had made a pass at her. Once they got past the fact that Zoe preferred men and wasn’t planning on changing that preference, they discovered that they had far too much in common not to be good friends."

"“There’s stories and then there’s stories,” he said, interrupting her. “The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you’ve heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. “The others are just words on a page.”"

"But music has its own enchantment and the first few notes of an old tune are all that it requires to transform any site into a place of magic, even if that location is no more than a windowless office cubicle in the old Firehall’s basement."

"“I don’t care what he told you. He’s an asshole, plain and simple.” “Well, then how’d you get to know him?” “Even assholes come in handy sometimes. You ever try to take a shit through your nose?”"

"In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express; only the drum was older."

"Creeps don’t need reasons for what they do; that’s why they’re creeps."

"That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."

"The best kinds of practical jokes are those that backfire on whoever’s playing the trick."

"The road leading to a goal does not separate you from the destination; it is essentially a part of it."

"The mystery didn’t concern himself overly much with the workings of the world. He simply went where he went, did what he did, amoral as a wind that is neither good nor evil, but simply is."

"“I’d rather stare at a brick wall, any time, than watch that damn TV in the lounge,” he’d told Jilly more than once. “That’s when things started to go wrong—with the invention of television. Wasn’t till then that we found out there was so much wrong in the world.”"

"“When all’s said and done,” Mally said, “all roads lead to the same end. So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it.”"

"“Don’t you ever watch TV?” Jilly shook her head. “What? And let the aliens monitor my brain waves?”"

"Do you know what fear stands for? Fuck Everything And Run."

"“He can be so sweet on one page, and then on the next he’s taking you on a tour through an abattoir.” “Just like life,” Bramley said."

"It was so simple that she could have wept. The mystery was only what you brought to him."

"Blasting out of the stores speakers was the new Beastie Boys album. It sounded like a cross between heavy metal and bad rap and was about as appealing as being hit by a car. You couldn’t deny its energy, though."

"Jilly was one of those who preferred to know what was going on and try to do something about it, rather than pretend it wasn’t happening and hoping that, by ignoring what was wrong, it would just go away. Truth was, Jilly had long ago learned, trouble never went away. It just got worse—unless you fixed it."

"It’s not that I don’t have convictions, or that I won’t defend them. I save my battles for things that have meaning instead of tilting at every mild irritation that comes my way. You can fritter away your whole life with those kinds of windmills."

"The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since."

"Jilly always says the family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into; that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics."

"Humanity’s whole unfortunate history is one long account of how we attack what we don’t understand, what’s strange to us."

"The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents."

"It’s a pleasure that you don’t outgrow the anthology."

"If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?"

"See, when you get down to the basics of it, everything’s just molecules vibrating. Which is what music is, what sound is—vibrations in the air. So we’re all part of that music and the worthier it is, the more voices we can add to it, the better off we all are."

"She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical. Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real."

"I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times."

"Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward. I think the trick is to adapt to the level of a student, but never rest on that level — always make them reach out. … If a student does not quite get it the first time, he or she will come back and get it later. If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle."

"All students are capable of growth. Some of them seem to be very slow to begin with and it’s probably not their fault, nor do I think it’s a matter of genetics. It’s a matter of what has happened in their lives before. They are all capable of growing, but they will not grow unless you interest them, captivate them in some way, and then make them reach out. Then they will finally enjoy reaching out."

"Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. It expands you in every way. It illuminates what you’re doing. It shows you possibilities you haven’t thought of. It enables you to live the lives of other people than yourself. It broadens you, it makes you more human. It makes life enjoyable."

"I think most of the things I published have been published out of desperation, not because they were perfected."

"One of the joys of teaching with the anthology is to watch the excitement grow as students, who may think the past dull and irrelevant, find how fresh and new and powerful are the kinds of writings that are hundreds of years old."

"I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It’s not the final thing, it’s the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite. At first, students tend to freeze at the first effort. The breakthrough comes when they realize that they can make it better — can identify what their purposes were and realize better ways to achieve those purposes. That is the important thing in teaching students to write: not to be frozen in their first effort."

"I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not something I’ll let happen to me again."

"When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that."

"If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false."

"We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature."

"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."

"The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves."