Like a kick in the butt, the force of events wakes slumberous talents.

City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind's eye the notion of a better life ahead.

The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

Country people do not behave as if they think life is short; they live on the principle that it is long, and savor variations of the kind best appreciated if most days are the same.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

Like a kick in the butt, the force of events wakes slumberous talents.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

A writer's work is to witness things.

Black bears, though, are not fearsome. I encountered one on the road to my house in Vermont, alone at night. I picked up two stones just in case, but I wasn't afraid of him. I felt a hunter's exhilaration and a brotherly feeling.

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all.

When I was 18 I worked with the Ringling Brothers circus, taking care of menagerie animals. I used to rather deliberately risk my life with the big cats.

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

The milking machines sounded tranquilizing and there was the collegiality of seventy animal spirits thriving warming the barn with cud chewing nose snuffling and sisterly mammalhood.

Silence is exhilarating at first as noise is but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm women with a hug and the hug wears better in the long run.

There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile.

Silence is exhilarating at first “ as noise is “ but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

I've done a lot of Super Bowls and appeared in a lot of big, big events and places and the Masters and what have you, but there was nothing as intimidating as speaking with Billy Graham.

Big shows are more like events and small shows are more like traditional gigs.

I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.

We not only interpret the character of events... we may also interpret our interpretations.

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.

An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary.

It seems proper, at all events, that by an early enactment similar to that of other countries the application of public money by an officer of Government to private uses should be made a felony and visited with severe and ignominious punishment.

Of history, how little do we know by personal contact; we have lived a few years, seen a few men, witnessed some important events; but what are these in the whole sum of the world's past.

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events.

Evil events from evil causes spring.

The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.

The decathlon includes ten separate events and they all matter. You can't work on just one of them.

We are the only beings on the planet who lead such rich internal lives that it's not the events that matter most to us, but rather, it's how we interpret those events that will determine how we think about ourselves and how we will act in the future.

Which suggests something about media and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents and presents them. There is a third element: what the public is ready to accept, what the public wants to know.

All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise.

The concept of reason itself appears as an artificial attempt to separate intellectual powers from the frustrations, emotions, and accidents which cause events; the concept of reason is viewed as facade to prevent change.

I seem to have been everywhere in the last 30 years, maybe not in the epicenter but flying around the periphery of extraordinary events and equally extraordinary people.

Yes, it's a prequel. It tells the story about how the girls were born with superpowers, but they weren't necessarily heroes at the beginning of this movie, so the movie is about the events that happen in their life to make them decide to be heroes.

In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events.

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.