Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

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 dream in doctrines, how tidy!

If we cannot meet our everyday surroundings with equanimity and pleasure and grow each day in some useful direction then ... life is on the road toward misfortune misery and destruction.

I wouldn't say I was bullied, but I was definitely a bit of an outcast. It was more the kids thinking I thought I was cool. I started homeschooling in fifth grade, and I was much happier.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

I love to hand sew. I sometimes make clothing for my children, which of course they grow out of in a matter of minutes. I thoroughly love it.

I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.

The criminal does not expect his prey to fight back. May he never choose you, but, if he does, surprise him.

It's harder to eat meat when you know the animal's name...I have found.

I know there are certain gifts that each of us have. The gifts you don't have to worry about so much, because God gave them to us. It's the living, it's the life, it's the now.