Our landmarks were the mountains and the gaps between them, old wood churches, shuttered mills, rusted-down brickyards, and a truck that coughed to a stop in the middle of a blackberry thicket in 1953 and would never, ever come to life again.
I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition.
Ask yourself how old would you be if you didn’t know the day you were born.
Laughter is the most beautiful and beneficial therapy God ever granted humanity.
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.
“The edge of the sun began to touch the edge of the horizon. . . . The brilliant light over the earth began to dim, but there was a tremendous band of orange light that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, as if the sun were a molten liquid that had emptied into a tube along the horizon.”
I blame no one. I look in the mirror.
Speech that pets the cat of social justice backward elicits screeches and scratches.
He [William Raspberry] had a way of telling you to go to hell and making you look forward to the trip.
Our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again.
Life without wonder is not worth living. Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.
John Wayne’s walk is like the heavy heaving of a barge on a rolling ocean swell.
Cultivate friends you disagree with, as well as those with whom you agree, because together you’ll locate the soft spot in your own thinking and find common ground to build on.
What’s another word for Thesaurus?
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
