I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.

Life offers you a thousand chances... all you have to do is take one.

There is no technique, there is just the way to do it. Now, are we going to measure or are we going to cook?

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

Five tender apricots in a blue bowl, a brief and exact promise of things to come.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If you've got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you're going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.

Where is it written that houses must be beige? Any dun colored house would look better if painted pineapple, cream, ochre, or even a smart sage.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

Leaders don't pray to God for money. They simply ask for His grace to solve problems. By solving problems, the money comes.

Speech is silvern silence is golden.

God made man, and then said I can do better than that and made woman.

Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.

We must stress that the euro has been beneficial to the European Union because, otherwise, in this context of international turmoil, every country would have to devalue their currencies.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses.

If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.

We sure as ruddy heck ain't in Prentisstown no more," I say to Manchee under my breath.

There's no destination. The journey is all that there is, and it can be very, very joyful.