Nancy Willard Quotes

#1. We don't really understand something until we have forgotten it.

Nancy Willard

#2. Faith takes root in the insignificant.

Nancy Willard

#3. Live in your roots, not in your branches.

Nancy Willard

#4. What you need will come back to you.

Nancy Willard

#5. Answers are closed rooms; and questions are open doors that invite us in.

Nancy Willard

#6. What one heart finds hard to believe, a hundred find easy.

Nancy Willard

#7. If prayers worked, Hitler would have been stopped at the border of Poland by angels with swords of fire.

Nancy Willard

#8. Armenian folklore has it that three apples fell from Heaven: one for the teller of a story, one for the listener, and the third for the one who 'took it to heart.' What a pity Heaven awarded no apple to the one who wrote the story down.

Nancy Willard

#9. In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

Nancy Willard

#10. When I was growing up, I loved stories in which a girl sets out on a quest to rescue the prince instead of the other way around.

Nancy Willard

#11. Jean Piaget observed that scarcely any question seems absurd to a child, but he was silent on the question of absurd answers from adults.

Nancy Willard

#12. Sometimes questions are more important than answers.

Nancy Willard

#13. It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.

Nancy Willard

#14. I haven't a clue how my story will end, but that's all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, that's when you discover the stars.

Nancy Willard

#15. The skin of moss / holds the footprints of / star-footed birds.

Nancy Willard

#16. Our house is quiet, small and plain,
and yet its rooms run far and wide.
A hundred pencils, swift as rain,
writing on sheets of beaten gold
would not be quick enough to hold
the strange adventures
shadows hide ...

Nancy Willard