It is not that death comes, but that life leaves.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.

When a wave of love takes over a human being... such an exaltation takes him that he knows he has put his finger on the pulse of the great secret and the great answer.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men

I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.

A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn't

It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters.

Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man's mind.

Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time.

Ants in the house seem to be, not intruders, but the owners.

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

Consume life before it spoils.

Health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit. When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open.

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.

I have faith, as I did when I announced my stem-cell decision in 2001, that science and ethics can coexist.

As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.

It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.

The gap between bat and pad is so much that I would have driven a car through it... !!

I heard black people sing and the emotion was overwhelming to me. The power of that with all the built in sorrow and joy was just overwhelming to me as a little kid. It was the real deal.