So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.

In the long winter evenings he talked to Ma about the Western country. In the West the land was level, and there were no trees. The grass grew thick and high.

The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don't remember me at all.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.

But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.

So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.

So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under.

Suffering passes, while love is eternal. That's a gift that you have received from God. Don't waste it.

They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the town of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once before, but it looked different now.

The path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.

Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.

If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.

Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.

It is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.

Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.

Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes, and Mary was blind.

Home is the nicest word there is.

There is good in everything, if only we look for it.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred and we are better throughout the year for having in spirit become a child again at Christmas time.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

It is the sweet simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

Some old fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat.

The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas time.

There is good in everything, if only we look for it.?

A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.

The success of a film at the box office will ensure happiness to the entire unit, but individual awards are like vitamin shots that will help boost the morale of an actor.

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.

I wish I could renounce politics.

There are things they tell us that sound good to hear, but when they have accomplished their purpose they will go home and will not try to fulfill our agreements with them.

I want to be someone who can be a role model to kids - and to everyone, for that matter.

I remember playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them - I would think of a character and pretend to be someone else.

I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

When life doesn't make sense, we can still have peace.

I want to be engaged and moved by theatre, there's nothing more disappointing than being left cold. After 'The Author,' I felt wrung out emotionally, like a used tissue.

Taste and love are not the servants of the will. Love is and must be free. It rises from the heart like perfume from a flower.

There is no future. This is the season. Get to the Super Bowl.

You have to have the right atmosphere, really be in the right mood to really fully enjoy a Cohiba.

I use my iPhone as an alarm, so when it goes off, I pick it up and casually scroll through whatever emails may have come in while I was asleep.

I did not have any money, so when I came to New York, I just dressed myself with whatever I could find and the Army-Navy store.