8.

So maybe that's the answer to my question, Why me? Why us? Because we are the ones we've been waiting for. What I want to say to isolated, angry, fearful youth– to all the children society has regarded as disposable, children who cannot love others because they have not yet learned to love themselves, all the sad, the lonely, the frightened who might read my books is this: you are seen, you are not alone, you are not despised, you are unique and of infinite value in the human family. As a writer I can try to say this through the words of a story, but it is up to each of us who come into contact with these children every day in our homes, our schools, our communities and as citizens of this broken world–it is up to us to embody those words— we, each of us, are the word of hope become flesh.

-Katherine Paterson, ABF Stockholm(speech)