“Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.”

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.

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.

I mean, just because you’re a musician doesn’t mean all your ideas are about music.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

I’m not a city kind of guy. I’m happiest when I’m tromping through the woods. That’s why I don’t live in Los Angeles.

Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I’m not nostalgic about the old city. I don’t enjoy it that much.

I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.

I’m not a city kind of guy. I’m happiest when I’m tromping through the woods.

I am the son of poor peasants who came at a very young age to live in Algeria. I only recently saw the place where they were born, near the city of Marrakech.

I spent a lot of time standing on street corners [of New York City] talking to local residents. I spent time in bookstores and galleries. But most of the time, I really did not have much to do.