Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

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.

Two worst things as can happen to a child is never to have his own way - or always to have it.

Look for her not in the valleys below, nor in the temple rooms. For she has gone, gone into the high passes, far beyond this dying moon.

They that go down to the sea in ships that do business in great waters these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.

The masters of life know the way, for they listen to the voice within them, the voice of wisdom and simplicity, the voice that reasons beyond cleverness and knows beyond knowledge.

I have broken my collarbone twice in a year.

Below a certain point, if you keep too quiet, people no longer see you as thoughtful or deep; they simply forget you.

One of my weaknesses happens to be lying, and I could tell you that I'm never going to lie again in my life, but that would be a lie.

I want to share the ballet world with everyone.

Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change

That sounded about as likely as Apophis and Ra becoming Facebook buddies, but I decided not to say anything.