Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

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.

Once you have walked down the grief path, what you have gained on your journey may turn into invaluable advice for someone else.

Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.

and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.

You owe others a happy disposition

When I do overcome my fear - what's going to happen is that I'm going to want a plane.

I don't think I'd have any friends if I didn't obscure at least 99% of my thoughts.

More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

Only the best are bullied.

All writers should strive to deliver something fresh-something editors or readers won't know they want until they see it.