Cheryl Hager

“It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren't good or bad,
they're just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on.”
― Kaye Gibbons, A Virtuous Woman

“Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country's shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who'd watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“I was dead until you found me, though I breathed. I was sightless, though I could see. And then you came...and I was awakened.”
― J.R. Ward, Lover Awakened