Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. ... The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

Gloom we have always with us, a rank and sturdy weed, but joy requires tending.

We don't get enough pampering. If we were once the only child of an adoring mother, we developed a taste for it; if not, we developed a thirst for it.

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Dogwoods are great optimists. Daffodils wait and see, crouching firmly underground just in case spring doesn't come this year, but dogwoods have faith.

Cats vary so widely that all data is meaningless and the professional classifiers gnash their teeth trying to come up with even a single fact common to all.

True ownership of anything requires time.

New York was where we wanted to live when we were finally grown up, and drink martinis and stay out past bedtime.

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

By and large, people who enjoy teaching animals to roll over will find themselves happier with a dog.

The only people who still read poetry are poets, and they mostly read their own.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

Now the only way you can serve God on earth is by serving others.

When I was really young, my mom enrolled me in dance classes.

Saigon is hot, full of atmosphere, activity, and commerce.

Good bread and good butter go together. They are one of the perfect marriages in gastronomy, and they never fail to cheer me.

Ps 119:89-91: The settled Word in Heaven makes for a solid foundation on earth and a safe path for today.

My masters are strange folk with very little care for music in them.

I'm just trying to be truthful and collaborate with people who have interesting things to say.

At my second record label, they told me and other female artists that some of us were going on the chopping block. I was 19... and it was devastating.

It's not what you take when you leave this world behind you. It's what you leave behind you when you go.