Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.

The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.

What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.

Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.

What's the use of inventing a better system as long as there just aren't enough folks with sense to go around?

perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.

Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?

Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.

If a man has ten good qualities and one bad one, to look at the ten and forget the one, and if a man has ten bad qualities and one good one, to look at the one and forget the ten.

You dinna need to understand me, Sassenach," he said quietly. "So long as you love me.

All music is good music, if it touches your soul.

And there my little doves did sit With feathers softly brown And glittering eyes that showed their right To general Nature's deep delight.

I know how absurd things can get. I've had years where I've had questionable things going on in my life.

I watch many, many, many independent films every year that you see once in a film festival and they're never heard of ever again. Many of them are very, very good.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.