The only thing more destructive than a tornado is a family.

Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for.

Strength just comes in one brand - you. Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed

Stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.

The sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives.

Cities are the least permanent things in our civilization.

As a child I thought it was very boring when I had to sit with [my mother] on the city streets, but the time sank deep and surfaced later.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats.

Normal is just a settng on your dryer

I think, therefore I am, dangerous.

In China, we don't have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn't even have a gallery.

We may be finding that in some blacks, when the choke hold is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up like in normal people.

Stupidity in a woman is unfeminine.

If you're a painter, paint. But you don't have to put Jesus in every picture. Paint well, and if you paint well enough, they might ask you why you do that.

The best-run churches and organizations are masters of the midcourse correction. They plan in pencil.

I remembered the 500 people that lived on a reserve outside my little town, behind a big fence.

There is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Every single circumstances of your life can change!

[All religious sects] dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight; and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversion of the duperies in which they live.