In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.

I think when you have big dreams you attract other big dreamers.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

"A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, "This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.

I got dreams so big they'd scare some people.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

I’m the type of person that likes to dream big, and I’ve often found that every great journey begins with a dream

I was asked to talk to a roomful of undergraduates in a university in a beautiful coastal valley. I talked about place, about the way we often talk about love of place, but seldom how places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain collected and coherent.

They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness.

And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.

The bigness of the world is redemption.

Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.....

I told the student that they were at an age when they might begin to choose the places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were much more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked each of them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who'd left the home they'd spent their whole lives in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them.

I found books and places before I found friends and ment

We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt — I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted — and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.

[Africa] just felt like a place where I belonged. It was as simple as that. You hear about the land and you hear untold truths about it, and now you’re old enough to witness it yourself. It just gave me a whole other perspective on where I’m from. What we’re doing in the city of Compton and how the world is just so much bigger than the city of Compton.

I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.

It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.