I'll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.

There is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.

Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes - old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just as remarkable.

How I wish you could have known me in my strength.

...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels.

It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying.

The sun was brightly mild. There was the crisp sound of maple leaves just ripe enough to fall, and leather oak leaves that would cling until a wind took them, and the smell from the fields of all the life that had burned through all those crops until it spent itself down like a fire. It was almost the smell of smoke.