If you listen, not to the pages or preachers but to the smallest flower growing from a crack in your heart, you will hear a great song moving across a wide ocean whose water is the music connecting all the islands of the universe together, and touching all you will feel it touching you around you... embracing you with light. It is in that light that everything lives and will always be alive.

-Excerpt from John Squadra's Book of Poems, This Ecstasy

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day... "Does it happen all at once, or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

- Margery Williams, from The Velveteen Rabbit