The successful truck gardener can never go out to dinner in the summer or spend a week end away, because his conscience tells him he has to be at home eating up his corn or packaging his beans for the freezer.

Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves.

Men can't be trusted with pruning shears any more than they can be trusted with the grocery money in a delicatessen . . . They are like boys with new pocket knives who will not stop whittling.

The mass of men live lives of quiet exasperation.

If childhood is still a state, it is now chiefly a state of confusion.

In a successful marriage, there is no such thing as one's way. There is only the way of both, only the bumpy, dusty, difficult, but always mutual path.

I have read that during the process of canonization the Catholic Church demands proof of joy in the candidate, and although I have not been able to track down chapter and verse I like the suggestion that dourness is not a sacred attribute.