“Man, Duke and I work our fannies off. We don't eat expensive dinners out. We don't go to the mvies or buy our clothes anywhere but Kmart--our biggest treat is taking the kids to Walmart on Friday nights, having a fast food hamburger and doing the grocery shopping.”

“As I wrote 'The Christmas Lamp' I realized that tradition is priceless, whether you have a small family, a large family, or no family.Tradition doesn't have to be logical; it only has to emphasize the light of Christ and his everlasting love.”

“Don't bitch about the clothes that you try on. Blush all you want--""What makes you think I'll blush?""If you don't, we won't take them.”

“A long time ago I realized that, as psychiatrists, we had to have a healthy respect for our own humanness, and our own smallness in the face of what we were dealing with. If a person got better, we could appreciate that we had done a good job, but we also needed to realize that God – or luck – was on our side. If the person got worse and had to go to a state hospital, we had to keep ourselves from feeling that we hadn’t done enough. For the truth is, we were powerless in so many of these situations. We did what we could, but sometimes the illness was just bigger than we were.”

“When we feel weak, we drop our heads on the shoulders of others. Don't get mad when someone does that. Be honored. For that person trusted you enough to, even if subtly, ask you for help.”

“On the farm, in our first-floor bedroom, my sister and I were sheltered in the essence of normal. We were not hidden, but unseen. The orange farmhouse was our castle, our kingdom the fields around, and the shallow creek that bisected our property the sea we crossed to find adventure.”

“Then came the recession and the end of the Bush boom, and with it came the realization that we were all worker drones paying off our bloated mortgages, bloodsucking corporations and even each other- we are the dead”