my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.

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.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

It's terrifying to show incomplete footage.

I like interior decorating. I really like to build houses. And landscaping, I like that.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

The discipline that is needed in our lives is the discipline that comes from within.

In my opinion, poets talk through the symptoms of disease. These symptoms of disease are predictions, screams, and songs.

Well, I worked with lots of different artists, of course.

To larger sight, the rim of shadow is the line of light.

This mystical stream [contemplative prayer] is the Western bridge to Far Eastern spirituality.

How is the human race going to survive now that the cost of living has gone up two dollars a quart?