“I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them from.”

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence.

Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.

No. I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me … I want someone to need me.

Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.

The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in.

As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.

Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard.

I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life–in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful–is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.

Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar.

Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?

It’s a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don’t want to understand it all. It’s beautiful because it’s always a mystery.

Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!

But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.

We’ll leave now, so that this moment will remain a perfect memory…let it be our song and think of me every time you hear it.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.

You’ve got to lie to stay halfway interested in yourself.

Make up your mind, Snail! You are half inside your house, And halfway out!

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

I feel like what I have become is halfway between my mother and my father, violent and impulsive and desperate and afraid. I feel like I have lost control of what I have become.

Liverpool are currently halfway through an unbeaten twelve-match run

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.