“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.”

Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane.

Love is the light that you see by.

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.

Jamie Foxx does a good rendition of me. It’s a real gift, mimicry of that kind, the tonal thing. It’s sort of like having a talent for playing an instrument.

I can see [ talent or curiosity for acting] in my oldest daughter [Julia Marie Pacino]. I don’t know how long she’ll run away from it, but it’s there in her.

I did it in Looking for Richard, too. And I figure, if I can weave it into the actual play and get the audience interested, like the robes going up and down, they’ll pay attention long enough to consume it.

Do what you have to do as long as you don’t hurt people.

I didn’t realize at the moment exactly what I had done…I only realized the enormity of it when I walked into the press room and got a long standing ovation.

Make your life exciting.

Because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.

Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago