I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars.

Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.

Genius . . . arises in the natural, aboriginal concern for the conscious unity of all phenomena.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough

Death by starvation is slow.

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas

As I walk .. as I walk .. / The universe .. is walking with me .. / Beautifully .. it walks before me .... / Beautifully .. on every side .... / As I walk .. I walk with beauty.

Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.

What women have to stand on squarely [is] not their ability to see the world in the way men see it, but the importance and validity of their seeing it in some other way.

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.

Don't trust people who tell you other people's secrets.

Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness.

You taught me to love the dark, Aidan. If that 's wrong, then I'm already damned.

She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.

With the art therapy, as soon as they saw the paper and crayons coming, we couldn't get it out fast enough. And we told them to draw about the tsunami.

Weapons of mass destruction are always in the wrong hands.

...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

Big government is the most corrupt industry in America.

As we grow older we should become not less radical but more so.

One thing I can guarantee you. You may not be a great deal wiser from my talk today, but you will be a great deal older.