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.

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.

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.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Our sacred duty is to proclaim and preach the gospel of salvation to all people from every nation.

I'd have been queen of all England, but Massachusetts haunted me and wouldn't let me go.

The most truly generous persons are those who give silently without hope of praise or reward.

For the truly faithful no miracle is necessary. For those who doubt no miracle is sufficient.

I claim that human mind or human society is not divided into watertight compartments called social, political and religious. All act and react upon one another.

Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.

I've never been on a film when an entire cast signs up for the entire time.

Teenagers are people too!

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

It's so funny - my mom when I am dating someone new, all she will get is the name, first and last, and within an hour, I will get an entire life report of the person.