Marilyn Chandler McEntyre quotes:

Listen into the silences where the best words begin.

Precision is, after all, not only a form of responsibility and a kind of pleasure, but an instrument of compassion. To be precise requires care, time, and attention to the person, place, or process being described.

A story is an invitation, and a challenge, and a choice.

Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body.

One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self.

So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love.

To read well is to prepare oneself to live wisely, kindly and wittily.