Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

It is quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person - beguiled, enchanted.

Christmas is not a date. It is a state of mind.

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.

Whatever laudable qualities the English may possess in their selection, preparation, and consumption of food, elegance, originality, diversity, and imagination are not among them.

Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.

Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for.

The greatest danger in any argument is that real issues often clouded by superficial ones, that momentary passions may obscure permanent realities.

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.

Of all the excellent teachers of college English whom I have known I have never discovered one who knew precisely what he was doing. Therein have lain their power and their charm.

Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

The fullness of life's balancing grace will demand the symmetry of recompense for all your loss and pain.

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

Stars are tragic. Most of the stars are nothing but reminders of love gone horribly wrong, or men challenging the gods.

I'm not anorexic. I'm from Texas. Are there people from Texas that are anorexic? I've never heard of one. And that includes me.

When I was a kid, the high point of the day was to go to the mailbox and see if any mail came for me, and I'm still stuck in that mode.

Grains are essentially sugar with enough opioids to make them addictive.

Another important time when I feel most alive is when I hear a song that I love so much that all I can do is dance - I feel so free!

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.