I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

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.

A child sees possibilities

Even when it was easy, music's patterning shaped the emotions . . . Music proclaimed an orderly universe, promised a better place.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

I rather wish to rest my case on material considerations, not those of the social future but those of the actual historical period of the capitalist world-economy.

I've never stunned anyone except in our D.A. lessons," said Luna, sounding mildly interested. "That was noisier than I thought it would be.

The frivolous work of polished idleness.

I think it's possible for all of us to use our yoga to distract us from our yoga. Because we get so caught up in the form that we forget the soul.

Sometimes I work upstairs projecting the movies, and the rest of the time I'm just selling tickets or popcorn.

A wise man once told me that only by leaving someone good can you meet someone better.

Love is the only real patriation, and without one's dear one sits in a dreary and boring exile.