“In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.”

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

Remember well, and bear in mind, a constant friend is hard to find.

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I’ll remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.

This earthly life is a battle,’ said Ma. ‘If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.

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.

Throughout your life there may be times when you have gone places you never should have gone and done things you never should have done.

I used to sing on the school bus everyday.

On wedding day you should look like yourself at your most beautiful

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can’t go home again; but that doesn’t mean you’re not free to try.

The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears.

I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.

This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation

May I suggest, instead of a war to feel better about yourself, perhaps… sit-ups? Maybe a fruit cup? Eight glasses of water a day?