My secret agenda is to convey my values to my kids.

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Share everything. Don't take things that aren't yours. Put things back where you found them.

Why is love easy? I don’t know. And the raccoons don’t say.

It's just this: that there are places we all come from-deep-rooty-common places- that makes us who we are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again-and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.

I often say that I don't worry about the meaning of life-I can't handle that big stuff. What concerns me is the meaning in life-day by day, hour by hour, while I'm doing whatever it is I do. What counts is not what I do, but how I think about myself while I'm doing it.