“There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.”

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.

My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.

Perfect valour consists in doing without witnesses that which we would be capable of doing before everyone.

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.

We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.

The pursuit of perfection is frustrating and a waste of time, because nothing is ever perfect.

He’s written some great songs. I thought that “Blues Man” was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.

My computer’s memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.