“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.”

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.

I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.

The neighborhood stores are an important part of a city child’s life.

Three thousand jurisdictions across the U.S. are estimated to have had gang activity in 2001. In 2002, 32% of cities with a population of 25 to 50 thousand reported a gang-related homicide.

I won the city scoring championship as a senior.

This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.

Chicago is seriously my favorite city in the country. People have roots here, which is nice. When you go to Los Angeles, no one is actually from Los Angeles.

That’s our mission: to clean and green New York City – one block at a time.

The Olympic Games of the Modern Era began in 1896 in the city of Athens.

We are New Yorkers. Proud citizens of the greatest city on earth. Thinking big isn’t new to us. It is the very foundation of who we are.