“Life begins at eighty.”

When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. … The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.

Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.

Many a good beginning makes a bad ending.

The wilderness needs your whole attention.

Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.

It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed.

We go lightheartedly on our way, never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some person will take our advice and use it.

There is nothing wrong with God’s plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.

If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it’s pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.

The uplift of a fearless heart will help us over barriers. No one ever overcomes difficulties by going at them in a hesitant, doubtful way.

Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.

The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for.

If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.

I’m very scared to do it. What if I don’t come back? With the whole light-years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later, and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over’.

Whatever God is urging you to clear away cannot begin to be compared to what He ultimately wants to bring you.

For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it’s great books, the “Upnishads,” and the “Bhagavad Gita.”

If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a ‘peace conference,’ you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes.

No matter where I go I know where I came from.

I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.

It wasn’t until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.