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We spend the first twelve months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up.

Phyllis Diller

The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to become a Writer.

Mary McCarthy

When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.

Billy, age four, from Breathing Together, edited by Richard Kehl

The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.

Lin Yutang

Strangers take a long time to become acquainted, particularly when they are from the same family.

M.E. Kerr

It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions but hard to get one single remedy.

Chinese proverb

What should young people do with their lives today? . . . The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Kurt Vonnegut

In the best sense of the word [Jesus] was a radical. . . . His religion has so long been identified with conservatism — often with conservatism of the obstinate and unyielding sort — that it is almost startling for us sometimes to remember that all the conservatism of His own times was against Him, that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to Him.

Phillips Brooks

The oaks and the pines, and their brethren of the wood, have seen so many suns rise and set, so many seasons come and go, and so many generations pass into silence, that we may well wonder what the ‘story of the trees’ would be to us if they had tongues to tell it, or we ears fine enough to understand.

Charles R. Skinner

We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The “waste howling wilderness” of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied “only” by wild animals. Places not used by us are “wastes.” Areas not occupied by us are “desolate.” Could the desolation be in the soul of man?

John A. Livingston