After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

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.

True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.

By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.

Road is road.

A country where there is no security of life is certainly not a country but just a slaughter house!

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

Simple music is the hardest music to play and blues is simple music.

To live - is that not enough?

That was an interesting aspect: to go to war with the Church to fight for the very thing that the Church was meant to give to people.

I try to go through it [emotional pain]; understanding is going to take me to a better place. And I do hot yoga.