Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

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.

Still, he figured, sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do, and then sometimes you've just got to run like hell after it's done.

Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?"Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL

Don't spend your life collecting other peoples postcards

Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.

If Christ lives in us, controlling our personalities, we will leave glorious marks on the lives we touch. Not because of our lovely characters, but because of his.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

I choose to live until death, not spend the time dying until death occurs.

I feel it's my duty as a human being, as a person who is trying - like everybody else who thinks about the state of the world - to enhance the importance of multicultural connection.

We really shouldnt be running education like a supermarket where you compare prices.

A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.