For myself, the Creek satisfies a thing that had gone hungry and unfed since childhood days. I am often lonely. Who is not? But I should be lonelier in the heart of a city.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

When a wave of love takes over a human being... such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn't

It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.

Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man's mind.

Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.

Ants in the house seem to be, not intruders, but the owners.

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

He wanted to be a poet, ' someone else put in while Maggie hugged Tim and patted his back. 'Said he'd only lacked the words to be one.

My words are my children. I am eternally grateful to the womb of my mind for conceiving them.

be it peace or happiness let it enfold you

He wants you to smile and smell sweet and be his lady love. He wants to hear you recite all your pretty little words the way the septa taught you. He wants you to love him... and fear him.

Sometimes you have to go places with characters and emotions within yourself you don't want to do, but you have a duty to the story and as a storyteller to do it.

I like progress but I hate change.

He who obeys with modesty appears worthy of being some day a commander.

I want to make people feel intensely alive. I'd rather have them against me than indifferent.

O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish.

Presidents by six years have been there long enough for the media and the country to see their flaws.