We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Restoration brings refreshment.

God would not have brought you to this place to leave you here without the archangel's help.

Sometimes a woman will look back on what she had, not because she wants to go there but to motivate her to do better.

Does not the gratitude of the dog put to shame any man who is ungrateful to his benefactors?

The problem with you, son, is that all your brains are in your head. (to a Liverpool trainee)

Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

People learn from failure or from lack of success.

You cannot know if you will be successful or not. You can only prepare for battle and it must be done with all of your heart and with all of your consciousness. In that manner, you will have an edge.

Only God knows You’re talking to him now.