the books of my numberless dreams

With a sudden enthusiastic gesture Calvin flung his arms out wide, as though he were embracing Meg and her mother, the whole house. “How did all this happen? Isn’t it wonderful? I feel as though I were just being born! I’m not alone anymore! Do you realize what that means to me?”

“But you’re good at basketball and things,” Meg protested. “You’re good in school Everybody likes you.”

“For all the most unimportant reasons,” Calvin said. “There hasn’t been anybody, anybody in the world I could talk to. Sure, I can function on the same level as everybody else, I can hold myself down, but it isn’t me.”

Meg took a batch of forks from the drawer and turned them over and over, looking at them. “I’m all confused again.”

“Oh, so ‘m I,” Calvin said gaily. “But now at least I know we’re going somewhere.”

—Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

• 5 Feb 2012
• 5

“I shall practice them—while—I shall practice, that I may dazzle you when next we meet.”

There was a little silence, and Luthe said, “You need not try to dazzle me.”

—Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown

(See a little of why I love this one on the Greenwillow Books blog.)

• 21 Oct 2010