“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”

“The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.”

“If you have it [love], you don't need to have anything else, and if you don't have it, it doesn't matter much what else you have.”

“Life is a long lesson in humility.”

“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”

“The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”

“I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memorie...”

“I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room”

“Instead of lullabies, my mother would sing us songs of the Revolution. Now she sings them to her grandchildren. 'Are you nuts?' I ask her. She replies, 'I don't know any other songs.”