“This could be a whole life,” she thought. “You work eight hours a day covering wires to earn money to buy food and to pay for a place to sleep so that you can keep living to come back to cover more wires. Some people are born and kept living just to come to this.”

If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful. But because there are so many, you just can’t see how beautiful it really is.

Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence.

Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.

No. I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me … I want someone to need me.

Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

It’s come at last”, she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache.

The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in.

As she read, at peace with the world and happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy, and all alone in the house, the leaf shadows shifted and the afternoon passed.

Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard.

I came to a clear conclusion, and it is a universal one: To live, to struggle, to be in love with life–in love with all life holds, joyful or sorrowful–is fulfillment. The fullness of life is open to all of us.

Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere – be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar.

Is it not so that a son what is bad to his mother is bad to his wife?

It’s a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don’t want to understand it all. It’s beautiful because it’s always a mystery.

Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!

But the penciled sheets did not seem like nor smell like the library book so she had given it up, consoling herself with the vow that when she grew up, she would work hard, save money and buy every single book that she liked.

I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.

As attorney general, Ive had some connection with just about every important public issue in the last eight years in Kentucky.

The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout.

We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. “Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that’s really fancy. Well we’ve got an eight-track. We’ve got it going on here.”

I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

For an actor, you’re rejected eight or ten times a day. All you’ve got to sell is yourself. You’re not selling products, they’re not turning down a car, they’re turning you down. Most people can’t handle that. Most people are essentially not set up that way.

I was a model for eight years. That’s the deal: People look. But I didn’t like being looked at and never seen.

I work eight hours a day, but I’m not writing all that time. I’m thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.