Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.

Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.

If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.

Especially at a time when one's life was new, roots helped.

Inspiration for my short stories grows from a psychic kernel, a vision of some sort or an eccentric, colorful dream.

My health may be better preserved if I exert myself less, but in the end doesn't each person give his life for his calling?

The creeping wilderness will soon take over that church that trusts in its own strength and forgets to watch and pray.

It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.

We can grow so accustomed to being spoon-fed the Word of God that we sometimes forget how to examine the Scriptures for ourselves.

Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible only through the portal of the present moment.

I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

If I and my two children cannot move the gods, the gods must have their reasons.

Well, there's nothing strange about Americans as a whole. But, Angelinos are different!