A hopeful journey is more important than the destination.

Everybody dies. It’s no risk to lose your life. You knew it was lost from the beginning.

I had always been a boy in this place, and many of the trees and rocks and streams had been old men when I knew them. Some had died. All had changed. I knew that. I had changed the most.

The world bein’ so small ain’t always a good thing for those of us who ain’t searchin’ for new and different stuff.

One of the worst things I’ve learned about getting older is that there seems to be more change that you don’t like than there was when you were younger and you can’t do nothin’ about it.

You can be spiritual all by yourself. Everybody has a soul. But to be religious, it seems like you need other people, and then sometimes it becomes more about the people than the soul.

Porches could be cleaned with a broom in a few minutes, but the soul could not be swept. It had to be shaken. And shaking the loess from a soul took a lifetime and more strength than most people had.

It remains for you to save one before saving others, to lead one before leading others.

Reading had always been, through bad, boring, or better times, his best connection to humans.

If all you do is think about what you need, you’re no better than an animal in the woods, and no smarter either. To be human, you’ve got to want. It makes you smarter and stronger.

Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don’t save yourself, they will die.

What joy to fully know and feel the bond of true friendship.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.

I hope we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures.

Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.

Where there's a chase or whatever, it's not being thrust into it.

Distance lasts a day. But Reality lasts a lifetime.

It's always exciting for me to perform.

O You Who are hidden, body, soul and divinity, Under the fragile form of bread, You are my life from Whom springs an abundance of graces; And, for me, You surpass the delights of Heaven.

We are not just flesh and blood. And our hungers are not going to be set aside as just flesh and blood.

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.