simply to ask a blessing upon one's circumstances, whatever they are, is somehow to improve them, and to tap some mysterious source of energy and joy.

Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realize you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

Let me remember that each life must follow its own course, and that what happens to other people has absolutely nothing to do with what happens to me.

What feeling is so nice as a child's hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.

Death is the perfect knowing.

A child's hand in yours - what tenderness and power it arouses. You are instantly the very touchstone of wisdom and strength.

The man or woman who treasures his friends is usually solid gold himself.

When you write from the heart, you not only light the dark path of your readers, you light your own way as well.

the habit of shutting doors behind us is invaluable to happiness; we must learn to shut life's doors to cut out the futile wind of past mistakes.

Man is the only creature whose emotions are entangled with his memory.

There must be some deep psychological reason why we turn so instinctively toward home at this special time. . . . A place where every day will be Christmas, with everybody there together. At home.

A violinist fiddled.With strings resined for winter.Summer's light splintered.

I always choose to do the thing that scares me.

Casting the locals is my primary concern because all the other things you assume will be manageable.

There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring.

Happiness is.....finding two olives in your martini when youre hungry.

Success is a ladder that cannot be climbed with your hands in your pocket - The road to success is always under construction

Hasten slowly and ye shall soon arrive.

Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.

I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.