The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

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.

People die from lack of shared empathy and affinity. By establishing social connectedness, we give hope a chance and the other can become heaven. ( "Le ciel c'est l'autre" )

It's simple. You enrich your life when you enrich the lives of others.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner, there ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation.

To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.

Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.

Even the idiot may have a message for us

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.