Books became my life, or maybe I should say books became the way I escaped from my life.

If there’s one thing I’d like most for you, it’s that you’ll find your calling in life. That’s where true happiness and purpose lies. Whether it’s taking care of abandoned animals, saving old houses from the wreckin’ ball, or reading to the blind, you’ve got to find your fire, sugar. You’ll never be fulfilled if you don’t.

Then human mind holds tight to those things it can’t reconcile.

We are the authors of our lives, and, through choice or circumstance, some of us leave our stories unfinished or untold. Though it’s taken me a long while to get here, I’ve come to accept that life, like the vast woodlands that surround my childhood home, is layered with mysteries.

That’s life out there. See how it’s movin? Even the leaves on the trees is movin’. Life don’t wait for nobody, and even as special as you are, it ain’t gonna wait for you, neither. So it’s time to make up your mind that you’re gonna join it.

My mother used to say that each day was a gift and how we chose to unwrap it would determine our happiness.

I don’t give a chicken’s sorry ass who taught you. I just want to play.

If you allow things like this to ruin your day, pretty soon you’ll wake up and your life will be nothing but an endless string of ruined days that stretch as far back as you can remember.” She turned toward the window, her profile soft and blurred in the afternoon light. “Believe me, if you let disappointments take you too far, you’ll end up getting lost. You’ll never find your way out of it.

Northerners are exactly like their weather – cold and boring. And I swear, none of them has one iota of etiquette or propriety.

Murdering anything is just plain criminal, but a Southerner murdering a magnolia? Well, that’s an unforgivable sacrilege against nautre and the South.