“Now I have very little respect for the electoral system in the United States. I could have respected it in the early days, when the country was small and we had small population. The system that we have in the United States was set up at a time when the total population was the population of Tennessee. We've stretched it to try to make it work for different kind of problems and in stretching and adapting it, we've lost its meaning. We still have the form but not the meaning. There's a lot of things that we have to look at critically that might have been useful at one time that are no longer useful I think there's some good in everything. There's some bad in everything. But there's so little good in some things that you know for practical purposes they're useless. They're beyond salvation. There's so much good in some things, even though there's bad, that we build on that.”

“eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all we've got to do is to trusten - Master Marner, to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know.”

“Funny thing about guilt: There's nothing so bad that you can't add a little guilt to it and make it worse; and there's nothing so good you can't add guilt to it and make it better. Guilt distracts us from a greater truth: we have an inherent ability to heal. We seem intent on living through even the worst heartbreak... How? ... Practice.”

“This is life. We have to take it as it comes, because even though some things are really shitty, there's a lot of really great stuff too.”

“You know, son, I don't think there's such a thing as an easy life. There's always going to be hard work and there will always be misfortunes we can't control, lurking out at the edges - storms, sickness, wolves. But there is such a thing as a good life and I think that we have one here.”

“There's always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn't get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There's always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can't eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That's when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.”