A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Everybody has. It wouldn't do for us to have all our dreams fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.

After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.

And if you give your heart to a goal, it will repay you. It's the law of the universe.

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness; Round our restlessness, His rest.

Every previous era looks innocent.

The audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves.

Being on the road is like a campout. I'm the only girl. The guys in my band are like my big brothers. It's definitely an adventure, but it can be a nomadic lifestyle.

That's interesting to hear you say that because watching it [the Waitress] for the first time at Sundance was fascinating - it was so different from the experience of making it.

Doubt is merely a thought. When experience proves it wrong, it will quickly go away.

I think that at the core of faith is trust.