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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

Every living creature breathes.

You know you’re in love the moment you can touch the stars without reaching. -Morgan

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.

The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.

When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial cliches.

There's a capacity for appetite... that a whole heaven and earth of cake can't satisfy

In schools the main problem is not the absence of innovations but the presence of too many disconnected... piecemeal, superficially adorned projects... We are over our heads.

When we touch the foundation of the reality of the good news of God, we will never bother Him anymore with little personal complaints.

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as an animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Religion is ... the most pernicious single influence in human society, without one redeeming feature.