Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.

We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

The happiest people are the ones with the most community.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.