Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.

Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That's the hardest thing to find.

Lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.

I am convinced that not only do children need children's books to fine-tune their brains, but our civilization needs them if we are not going to unplug ourselves from our collective past.

Because way down deep they know that civilized people have to preserve rare birds.

It is sometimes necessary to use unnecessary words like thank you and please just to make life prettier.

By the time they get to 6th grade honor roll students won't risk making a mistake, and sometimes to be successful, you have to risk making mistakes.

The way I see it, the difference between farmers and suburbanites is the difference in the way we feel about dirt. To them, the earth is something to be respected and preserved, but dirt gets no respect. A farmer likes dirt. Suburbanites like to get rid of it. Dirt is the working layer of earth, and dealing with dirt is as much a part of farm life as dealing with manure. Neither is user-friendly but both are necessary.

When you hug someone, you learn something else about them. An important something else.

How can you know what is missing if you’ve never met it? You must know of something’s existence before you can notice its absence.