I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

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.

Focus on creating value by finding and solving problems for others.

poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

To believe that everyone is honest is folly, but to believe that no one is honest is worse.

Every economist knows that minimum wages either do nothing or cause inflation and unemployment. That's not a statement, it's a definition.

People are terrified for their own reputations. They want the press on their side.

Then he smiles as if he'd be happy to lie there and gaze at me forever.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.