No president has come near to rivaling Lincoln as a writer.

The Falklands held a mirror up to our own islands, and it reflected, in brilliantly sharp focus, all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood.

Travel. It was an intransitive verb. It didn't involve any destinations. It was going to the going's sake, to be anywhere but where you were, with motion itself as the only object.

Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.

In an underdeveloped country don't drink the water. In a developed country don't breathe the air.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

Critics? Don't talk to me of critics! You think some jackanapes journalist, his soul eaten away by the maggots of jealousy and failure, has anything worthwhile to say of art? I don't.

Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains.

Good travel books are novels at heart.

In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

Keep the faith. It is the greatest gift.

We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.

I've got kids and that's important. It's funny, you think that there's an expiration date on them and there just isn't.

In our evil we rebel against God. We take the law of God, written in his Word and on our hearts, and we disobey it.

Basketball is a pure invention.

Success is failing nineteen times and soaring the twentieth.

If your neighbors did an analysis of your life, what would they learn about the kingdom?

Life's most precious gift is uncertainty.