It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.

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).

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.