In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

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.

SEE what you think.

Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.

I thought I could, and thought I would, swim a lot quicker - much quicker.

You look like a puppy. Like I'm jingling my keys and you're jumping by the door waiting for your walk" "Woof.

There is that kind of happiness. There is the love and marriage and family kind of happiness, which is exceedingly boring to describe but nonetheless is important to have and dreadful not to have.

The value of being connected and transparent is so high that the roadbumps of privacy issues are much lower in actual experience than people's fears.

If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma , are sometimes consoling.