"Cooking"Cooking is 80"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice." is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."

"Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer."

"I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable."

"If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business."

"When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke."

"It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time."

"It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse."

"A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever."

"It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future."

"I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension."

"Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica."

"I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you."

"...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness."

"The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"

"No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins."

"Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not."

"Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up."

"Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."

"He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life."

"For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest."

"Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history."

"Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom."

"We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle."

"You can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece"

"Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony."

"Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say."

"Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down."

"A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill."

"When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven"

"You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next."

"I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written."

"Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?"

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides."

"Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed."

"What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us."

"Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!"

"You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own."

"If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable."

"The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do."

"Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back."

"How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets."

"If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."

"But children robbed of love will dwell on magic."

"Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular."

"This Forest eats itself and lives forever."

"Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is."

"The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations."

"I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect."

"Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work ... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work."

"Being a woman in music was fine, but when I wanted to direct, I was poking my head into a man's world."