Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.

Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

and sleeping put an end to summer, 1928,

No, ” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!

The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.

Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.

I wonder why guys mistreat and disrespect girls. But then they expect life to hand them a good woman when they're older and ready to settle down?

We renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can't do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality.

There's enough hate in the world. I command you to love. And you have to make an effort.

Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.

If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are.

There is nothing more profoundly serious than real comedy, which is an affirmation of human communion, redemption and grace.

No matter how tired you are, no matter how physically exhausting this work may be, it's beautiful to bring a smile into someone's life, to care for someone in need. What greater joy can there be?