Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

Like Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts and the block party on the last day of summer, we do things because traditions feel cozy and safe.

once you're gone, you made me feel nothing as if you were my emotions and you took it away from me.

He that will not permit his wealth to do any good for others ... cuts himself off from the truest pleasure here and the highest happiness later.

We now live in a country with a thousand political prisoners, a country where each week there are new trials, where people are put in jail because they liked something on the Internet.

Not long ago, when I was a student in college, just flying an airplane seemed a dream. But that dream turned into reality.

You may think you're married to a woman, but she's really an overgrown child.

Thousands of present day students, like many of our Founding Fathers, are being taught at home.

People said women couldn't swim the Channel, but I proved they could.

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.

Getting and becoming are siamese twins. If you want more than you have, you have to become more than you are.