Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

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.

You have to be excited about your life.

Believe me, my boy, women don't love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.

Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.

The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

There is an hour wherein a man might be happy all his life, could he find it.

They are fools who do not know how much the half exceeds the whole.

There's too many good musicians around for the music around for the business to be sagging.

The other day upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today; how I wish he'd go away!" ~Gabrielle O'Callaghan towards Adam Black

One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.