My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

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.

If beautiful lilies bloom in ugly waters, you too can blossom in ugly situations.

To strive is to endure.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.

Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

The early bird may get the worm, but its the second mouse that gets the cheese.

"I think forever is an incorrect concept," I answered. He smirked. "You're an incorrect concept." "I know. That's why I'm being taken out of the rotation".

The first thing I wanted to do, as a boy, was to be a skier, because I had seen film footage of somebody skiing.

‎"Dost thou understand? I love thee!" he cried again."What love!" said the unhappy girl with a shudder.He resumed,--"The love of a damned soul.

Modern man . . . has not ceased to be credulous . . . the need to believe haunts him.