Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

It would have been difficult to have an ugly daughter.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

I’m happiest with my family around me.

I wish I had been home more when the children were growing up. I missed a lot.

It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But… it is better to be good than to be ugly.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

It’s true; once you are a father, there’s no turning back. Your heart strings as well as your purse strings are never again the same.

When you’re young, you’re not afraid of what comes next. You’re excited by it.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

Players today moan about the number of games, but when you’re young, you can’t play enough.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.

The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

There is danger that we lose sight of what our friend is absolutely, while considering what she is to us alone.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn’t like that.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

My family is very good about visiting me, and other friends as well.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It’s really great.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they’re already asleep.

The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.