Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

When someone uses the power of their love, they feel strong, courageous, and enthusiastic.

The love of power is either due to low or overly high self-esteem.

I've always let my imagination run free, but now I try to rein it in. Things never turn out the way I imagine, so I am letting them rest. Instead, I am holding just what is in my hand.

The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun…

Troubles are God setting the stage for greater blessings in your life.

I am really rather like a beautiful Jersey cow, I have the same pathetic droop to the corners of my eyes.

The excitement of vitamins, nutrition and metabolism permeated the environment.

The scene is dull. Tell him to put more life into his dying.

My parents got divorced and military school gave me a structure. A lot of kids my age were children of divorced parents. They didn't know what to do with the kids.

Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness.