“They are the most painful tears in the world … the tears of the aged … for they come from dried beds where the emotions have long burned low.”

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,-why, I guess you’ve got to dream a garden.

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.

Except for our higher order of minds we are like the little moles under the earth carrying out blindly the work of digging, thinking our own dark passage-ways constitute all there is to the world.

Biggest affirmative argument I know in favor of ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ is just the way you feel inside you that nothin’ can stop you from livin’ on.

I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty . . . and maybe after that sorrow.

A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.

Our souls may all be equal in the sight of the Lord, but our gumption and ingenuity ain’t. So the results of man’s labor will never be equal.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

Some girls are apparently born with dates; some through much personal activity, achieve them; but others seem by necessity to have dates thrust upon them.

It takes a small town to keep you humble.

The greatest antidote in the world for grief is work, and the necessity of work.

You wouldn’t think that sorrow could be a light, would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes. . . . I think that is what love is to a woman . . . a lantern in her hand.

When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.

Things last so much longer than people.

I have no problem whatsoever with allowing gay people to live as they please, as long as they don’t try to impose their lifestyle on everyone else.

I’M HOPELESS, because I’ve lived long enough to expect things like this to continue to happen. I’m not surprised and at some point my little children are going to inherit the weight of being a minority and all that it entails.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

I’m out and about meeting people all day long. And I’m very friendly; I talk to just about everybody I meet.

When I entered high school I was an A-student, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to hang out with the guys.

There are things one does not say for a long time, but, once they are said, one never stops repeating them.

Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can’t do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time.

You know, you don’t get to survive that long without making some compromises.