Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

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.

Desire urges me on, while fear bridals me.

I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.

I was not a classic mother. But my kids were never palmed off to boarding school. So I didn't bake cookies. You can buy cookies but you can't buy love.

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.

The sad thing about working on a movie is that you can never see the movie.

There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today ... Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed.

I want to punish them. I want that punishment to be so hard, so vicious that the next who takes their place wets himself at the mere thought of trying to fight me.

I'd rather take a contested shot than an open shot any day ... It's kind of boring when you take open shots

Somebody said that my work might be an interesting source of material.

In the house of poetry nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.