My mother was the center of the family.
It's paradoxical, that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.
Don't rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your head.
Where some people may see loving grandparents, I see a pair of feckless boobs who can't drive, take way too long to shop, and don't even have the most basic grasps on the new technology. As a staunch supporter of the principles of Darwinism, I think that advances in modern medicine are starting to overrule the survival of the fittest, and it's to our [youngers'] detriment.
Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort - the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing - the opening a wonderfully joyous moment.
I've learned. . . That the easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people smarter than I am.
I have more dumb luck thank anybody I know. There must be a convey of guardian angels working twenty-four hours a day looking after me[. . . ] Like the night I first got to Nashville that I laid down in the middle of Broadway, waiting to get run over. It didn't happen [. . . ] I could swear they were keeping me alive just to see what I'd get next, I'm glad they feel that way. I'm trying to help them a little more this days.
Whenever they rebuild an old building, they must first of all destroy the old one.
One of the greatest challenges I've faced as a mother-especially in these anxious, winner-takes-all times-is the need to resist the urge to accept someone else's definition of success and to try to figure out, instead, what really is best for my own children, what unique combination of structure and freedom, nurturing and challenge, education and exploration, each of them needs in order to grow and bloom.
Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust.