In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart...filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.

Love is the light that you see by.

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

It takes a small town to keep you humble.

Our souls may all be equal in the sight of the Lord, but our gumption and ingenuity ain't. So the results of man's labor will never be equal.

not all clever words are true. ... And inversely most things that are true are not clever.

Some girls are apparently born with dates; some through much personal activity, achieve them; but others seem by necessity to have dates thrust upon them.

The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

Football is all I know.

I felt I came back rather quickly from being ill and didn't give myself the time to reflect.

I'm not a big fan of doing what my mother wants me to do, like any daughter.

Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on.

Even before I started writing songs, that was one of my goals to be a writer, and I still have that goal. I've just gotten sidetracked.

It's been liberating to be able to play someone who's a bada– or promiscuous, because that's the opposite of who I am … It's like a drug.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

Moscow seethes and bubbles and gasps for air. It's always thirsting for something new, the newest events, the latest sensation. Everyone wants to be the first to know. It's the rhythm of life today.