There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.

It is quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person - beguiled, enchanted.

Christmas is not a date. It is a state of mind.

Even one's yesterdays could not continue to stir and move in a man's mind unless there were a future for those yesterdays to make.

Whatever laudable qualities the English may possess in their selection, preparation, and consumption of food, elegance, originality, diversity, and imagination are not among them.

Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.

Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for.

The greatest danger in any argument is that real issues often clouded by superficial ones, that momentary passions may obscure permanent realities.

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.

Of all the excellent teachers of college English whom I have known I have never discovered one who knew precisely what he was doing. Therein have lain their power and their charm.

Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind.

I can recall quite clearly the journey from Omaha to San Francisco which I made with the opera troupe

How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.

I have met brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility with no history to guide them and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.

Atheist, without God, I look to humankind for sympathy, for love, for hope, for effort, for aid.

I go to a very visual place when I'm singing. It's very cinematic and I get this feeling of space. I love when music does that.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

The problem is that the economy isn't growing fast enough to accommodate the level of spending produced through the democratic process.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

Everybody has their challenges; I couldnt say that we have more challenges than other people, theyre just different.

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.