Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

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.

Stars are the souls of old sailors. They plot the skies and guide the wayward home.

In this world and the hereafter, we should not be afraid of no one but ourselves.

I said nothing. Deep inside of me, my voice screamed from a hole where I had buried it

Sewn together patterns, like many clashing moods, She wears what No others dare

Every power vested in a government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term a right to employ all the means requisite . . . to the attainment of the ends of such power.

We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.

A box of crayons and a big sheet of paper provides a more expressive medium for kids than computerized paint programs.

I think that the photos that we like were made when the photographer knew how to disappear. If there were a secret, certainly that would be it.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

If civilians are going to be killed, I would rather have them be their civilians than our civilians.