“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.”

… 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.

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.

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.

It’s not so much a question of whether we’ve shot it through 35mm or digital video; what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.

In real life, when someone’s partner calls them, they can tell from the first word their partner says what their mood is.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

Roxy Sorkin, your father just won the Academy Award. I’m going to have to insist on some respect from your guinea pig.

Solve a real problem. You don’t start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or the fame and glory that comes along with it. You become an entrepreneur to solve a real problem.

That’s a very real feeling – that I don’t have a story to tell. I’m not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.

Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.

People who don’t know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.