When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

Love is holy because it is like grace--the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.

Every sorrow suggests a thousand songs and every song recalls a thousand sorrows and so they are infinite in number and all the same.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

We are part of a mystery, a splendid mystery within which we must attempt to orient ourselves if we are to have a sense of our own nature.

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all.

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

You're what I've been looking for my whole life, and if you let me, I'll love you for the rest of yours.

Even if language is a living evolving organism we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive it can get sick.

Great moments are born from great oppurtunities.

Success is a process, a quality of mind and way of being, an outgoing affirmation of life.

A person can be danced. In all continents the dancers carry little children on their shoulders.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: do the painter's emotions come across?

Do I think faith will be an important part of being a good president? Yes, I do.

I can't be No. 1 with an MVP trophy. I could be No. 1 with the championship ring and the championship trophy on my fireplace.

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'

It is a hopeless endeavour to unite the contrarieties of spring and winter; it is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the play-things of childhood.