Only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.

It’s a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.

There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.

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.

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet in a garden.

When we contemplate buying something, we usually ask the price of it, then decide whether or not it is worth that much to us. But when we expend time and energy, we often just go ahead and pay.