It's compassion that makes gods of us.

... old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life.

my rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other.

What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.

when a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed.

will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.