The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to.

Farmers are philosophical. They have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts.

There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.

the bliss that comes from ignorance should seldom be encouraged for it is likely to do one out of a more satisfying bliss.

If 'heartache' sounds exaggerated then surely you have never gone to your garden one rare morning in June to find that the frost, without any perceptible motive, any hope of personal gain, has quietly killed your strawberry blossoms, tomatoes, lima and green beans, corn, squash, cucumbers. A brilliant sun is now smiling at this disaster with an insenstive cheerfulness as out of place as a funny story would be if someone you loved had just died.

The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.