My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances

Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back.

I wonder how a lioness will manage in a dovecote. Can you put away your teeth and claws?

The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be.

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.

The evening had turned sweet and blue.

Still anyone who trusts a serpent deserves its bite. The wise see a creature for what it is, not what it says it may be.

Still reading but learning a lot about true education and the process of guiding our children in their educational pursuits.

The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

They, and they only, advantage themselves by travel, who, well fraught with the experience of what their own country affords, carry ever with them large and thriving talents.

It takes forever to make a film. It's a gargantuan thing of untold effort.

It fascinates me to create beautiful paintings with the simplest means.

I think that people who don't mind reading find the immersion and their ability to get into a deeper place with the story to be satisfying. That's the kind of reader I want.

I'm the anti indie-rocker. My stuff isn't ironic.

Acting is not that far from mental disease: An actor works on splitting his character into others. It is like a kind of schizophrenia.

Never fear: Thank Home, and Poetry, and the Force behind both.