We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.

As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.

Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic-- even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious.

Omissions are not accidents.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser.

No one has ever held me so tightly. It's a shock to matter this much. It isn't like arms are around me, it's more like a house, as if he has made a house around me. As he did around Tommy.

Discipline means choices. Every time you say yes to a goal or objective, you say no to many more.

The author, at the time a Carter speechwriter in the 1980 campaign, showed visible distress at his boss's performance and was warned by a friend in the traveling press, lest he become the story.

There is nothing more relieving than speaking truth in tough moments.

The best way to bring up some children is short.

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

These teenagers [that drop out of school to take the higher wage jobs] take jobs that would go to unskilled adults, making it harder for those adults to make the transition from welfare to work.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

Dave played an important part in our growing, but change occurs.

Might does not make right! Right makes right!