Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

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.

Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.

A joyful life, life of contentment.

I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.

A flatterer never seems absurd: The flatter'd always takes his word.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

Cats can derive their nutrition from the air they breathe until you get the message that the Fish Fin Buffet you put in their bowl three days ago will never be acceptable.

I don't know how many people really knew who I was before the Olympics and that's the fun thing of the Olympics - you get to know someone who captures your heart, hopefully.

Do you see how Jerry Heller made it work? That is how he combined what we did to make the rap music into mass music. That's exactly how it happened.

It's never too late to start heading in the right direction.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.