Outside, the afternoon sun was an orange sliver on an icy horizon.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Many people see their problems to be permanent because they continue to face them with the same mental attitudes that created them.

Your attitude of gratitude will bring you altitude in business and multitude in blessings.

I've known him since dirt was new, Papaw laughed. We go way back...Dawg Papaw, that's a long time! Mark exclaimed.

An open heart is an open mind.

Lots of small business men have been contacting me to say they wish they had the nerve to say what I said.

After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

Love did not have to make sense. It did not have to be worthy. It did not have to be earned. It did not have to woo. It just simply was.

You'd think he'd ran out off rocks," I muttered

Real fatherhood means love and commitment and sacrifice and a willingness to share responsibility and not walking away from one's children.