“How can I help?”

“Learn to like what doesn't cost much.Learn to like reading, conversation, music.Learn to like plain food, plain service, plain cooking.Learn to like fields, trees, brooks, hiking, rowing, climbing hills.Learn to like people, even though some of them may be different...different from you.Learn to like to work and enjoy the satisfaction doing your job as well as it can be done.Learn to like the song of birds, the companionship of dogs.Learn to like gardening, puttering around the house, and fixing things.Learn to like the sunrise and sunset, the beating of rain on the roof and windows, and the gentle fall of snow on a winter day.Learn to keep your wants simple and refuse to be controlled by the likes and dislikes of others.”

“If we thought of life as a gift, we might not demand nearly as much from it. And if we lived more graciously, giving of ourselves more freely to the well-being of others, many of our personal concerns would disappear, and life would become easier for all.”

“How long can a man live on the outside before he loses his ability to love? How long before there's no more hope?”

“If we can dream it, we can do it.”

“All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words. ”

“Epilogue Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--why are they no help to me nowI want to makesomething imagined, not recalled?I hear the noise of my own voice:The painter's vision is not a lens,it trembles to caress the light.But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eyeseems a snapshot,lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,heightened from life,yet paralyzed by fact.All's misalliance.Yet why not say what happened?Pray for the grace of accuracyVermeer gave to the sun's illuminationstealing like the tide across a mapto his girl solid with yearning.We are poor passing facts,warned by that to giveeach figure in the photographhis living name.”