There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

I've done my best, and I begin to understand what is meant by 'the joy of strife'. Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.

Trust. It is like placing a blade in someone's hand and setting the very point to your heart.

Blue eyes say "Love me or I die" black eyes say "Love me or I kill thee."

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask; why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.

What I don't like are arrogant people. We're all equal. I don't like it when a person assumes to be better.

Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

What treaty have the Sioux made with the white man that we have broken? Not one. What treaty have the white man ever made with us that they have kept? Not one.