“Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.”

Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.

Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

It’s terrible to lose somebody, but it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Absent significant regulatory or tax changes, and a sharp transition could be disruptive.

Life, it seems, is nothing if not a series of initiations, transitions, and incorporations.

The reason I wrote political satire was because I thought it – politics – was important… that public policy was important. Then I transitioned into books, then into radio.

I think the difficult thing is the transition between TV competition series and going into the actual music industry. There still seems to be a slight disconnect there.

This will make the transition happen with less death and destruction.

If, as we decided in Munich, there will be a cessation of hostilities and humanitarian assistance can flow into Syria – then this will open the door for the beginning of the political transition process.

We do not deny the possibility of peaceful political transition, but we are still awaiting the first case.

To have attained to the human form is a source of joy. What an incomparable bliss it is to undergo these countless transitions.