“This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.”

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.

Annual plants are nature’s emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it.

The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.

Why should conservationists have a positive interest in… farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.

If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far:

To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.

The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.

I’m happy to say she was laughing while she said it, but she meant it. I’ve never learned to be a candle burning in an empty room. So I go on the screen, and I say whatever I’m told to say.

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

It doesn’t matter what people say. I have been face to face with some of the most trying moments of men’s lives when it meant so much to me if I kept the vision, and if I held fast to that which God had said. A man must be in an immovable condition.

Rock music is not meant to be perfect.