The fact is, we need markers in life, whether we subscribe to a religion or not. And the major holidays, such as Christmas, serve to remind us of the turning world.

A proper respect for nature means that you can't pollute the air, poison the rivers and chop down the forests indiscriminately without suffering greatly.

Christmas is, for those who wish to follow the way of Jesus, an invitation to accept into our comfortable and safe lives those who come to us from far away, who seem ragged, marginal, in transition.

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.

My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.

Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.

In a country where Americans sense, quite genuinely, that their freedoms have been taken away by the government - as in the U.S. Patriot Act, as in NSA surveillance - people feel powerless.

I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.

Is she always like this?" "No, usually worse.

You can't have any successes unless you can accept failure.

Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety other women cloy the appetites they feed but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.

I came to architecture from building. Because my father was a builder, everybody was - and is - a builder in my family.

We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

A lot of kids do look up to us. But there are just as many elderly people to put us down.

I'd like to do plays, maybe a one man show.

Bud Powell's probably the biggest influence on my piano playing.

We're in our twenties and we don't know anything and it's awesome.

The Amish like to live a very plain lifestyle, the way they think God intended. It sort of brings you back to, like, 'Little House on the Prairie' days or something.