Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.

A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

I don't like hiking with convicts carrying machetes.

O The irony of man, he thinks he's past generation did not repeat the same way of thinking, either intelligently or foolishly.

Acceptability is that secret, which brings in surrender, Which brings in totality, which brings in love, From where arises our Oneness.

In high school ethics they went around and asked what everyone thought their classmates were qualified to do. For me, everyone said actress. But to me it was very much "if it happens, it happens."

i remember we all cried like the Missouri when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because somebody pressed a button (and down went my uncle Sol and started a worm farm)

A belief is not a belief until you can visualize it, unless you can create a picture of it in your minds eye, especially if you have no doubts that reality can be - or is - possible.

I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.

If you're sad and you like beer, I'm your lady, ... The Saddest Music in the World.

If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that.

Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.

Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice;Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye,Frozen by distance.