The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

Under the rule of the "free market" ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joining, made. And now we touch each other with the tenderness of mortals, who know themselves