Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

As long as one person lives in darkness then it seems to be a responsibility to tell other people.

Millions of people are going to come to Jesus.

O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change.

Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know.

I will always have fears, but I need not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.

Infinitely more taboos, on television.

Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.

Sometimes I rant, in a comical way, about how the gods give with one hand and take with the other.

All womanhood is hampered today because the world on which it is emerging is a world that tries to worship both virgins and mothers and in the end despises motherhood and despoils virgins.

I find sadness and strife to be so much more interesting with an upbeat melody.