“People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.”

There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history… Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

Downstream is always someone else’s up.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.

Many people would rather be certain of their worries and fears, than risk the uncertainty of hope and optimism.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it’s the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband’s mood.

We need to practice acting in spite of fear, in spite of doubt, in spite of worry, in spite of uncertainty, in spite of inconvenience, in spite of discomfort, and even to practice acting when we’re not in the mood to act.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

Wherever we start to think that things are certain, uncertainty is lurking right there. Heedlessness is just holding things as certain. It is grasping at certainty where there is no certainty and looking for truth in things that are not true. Be careful! They are likely to bite you sometime in the future!