“there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!”

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.

We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.

We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

… Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

People ask without wanting to know.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

So I like the work he’s doing, and I support it, and I realise that he’s one of very few political leaders around the world that actually has early-childhood development strategise at the top of his agenda.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere.

[E]conomic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics