Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.

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.

Great leaders get people to admit the truth because they know that dreams are buried under the lies they tell themselves, in order to feel okay with giving up.

There is no road, the road is made by walking.

The president met with BP CEO Tony Hayward, and Obama was demanding that BP clean up the Gulf. And I'm thinking, good luck. They can't even clean up their gas station restrooms.

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

When we say that the persistence of competition is ensured by fate, we mean that individual freedom is so guaranteed. The one thing to which fate binds us is liberty.

I like to make people laugh, and I definitely think laughter is healing. It's one of my favorite thing to do, so I'm attracted to it for many reasons.

The way I look it is hard to look like a normal person. You know, in the streets when I was a kid, people always said I looked strange, and it made me feel unhappy.

I was either going onstage or going into an interview or getting on a plane. You can't really feel everything fully when you don't have the time to process.

I think the reality of prison is you don't get anything unless you want it in there. Whatever happens to you in prison, this is what you asked for. Nothing happens to you if you don't give that vibe.

If a German or an Austrian, a Greek or a Bashibazouk, had composed Gerontius, the whole world would have by now admitted its qualities.