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

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.

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.

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

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.

The idea that we can be exactly what the other desires is a powerful fantasy.

Oftentimes it's the smallest, seemingly inconsequential acts that make the biggest differences in our lives.

When you're on the road a lot, you're in perpetual search of a good night's sleep.

Until every individual feels personally responsible for the careful planning and the preservation of natural resources, the inexorable destruction will go on.

The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.

My energy level is very high ... how ambitious it all is depends on lots of different things. But pretty high energy level. I take on a lot of projects at the same time.

Good works may only be beautiful sins, if they are not done in a true spirit.

Love doesn't exactly come with an off switch.

When I was in college, I spent a summer working in London. I'd enjoyed tea before that, but then I got actual, really good tea there and never looked back.