"The greater efficiency which education gives to all sorts of labor, except the rudest, makes up in a short period for the time lost in acquiring it."

"The toad, without which no garden would be complete."

"Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it."

"What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back,—with a hinge in it."

"Public opinion is stronger than the legislature, and nearly as strong as the Ten Commandments."

"Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure."

"No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property."

"Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it."

"To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch, their renewal of life, this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do."

"A well known American writer said once that, while everybody talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it."

"The thing generally raised on city land is taxes."

"Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!"

"There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help."

"It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous."

"What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!"

"Politics makes strange bedfellows."

"And then music. Wind chimes. And the sound of someone playing a violin. A fiddle. Or maybe just the music of a little dragon's wings. Maybe."

"And even the most pleasant of dreams could be painful under the light of the morning sun."

"It seemed like every month that went by, every day older, life became more complicated. The rule for growing up seemed to be that no choice, no decision worth making was without some cost."

"A girl looking for emotion could starve in L.A."

"Strangewood was never silent. It was never supposed to be. There was such life and color in the wood and in the creatures who lived there that silence would be tantamount to death. It was very silent in Strangewood."

"He was still as kind as he had always been, but there was a distance in his eyes now that made her want to cry."

"Instead, it had slipped into her subconscious, and worked its way beneath her skin. -"

"A caffeinated Jenna is bad for everyone. -"

"Kreske had more authority, but he was a moron."

"Jenna Blake was still alive because she'd been willing to risk looking stupid."

"It was a beautiful day to grow up."

"Few men, indeed, are so mad that they do not know when they are doing wrong. But so avid is their pursuit of goods that wrongdoing has become an element of all they do. To protest that fact is idle. Our politics, our business — little and big, our professions, our labor, are smitten in every facet with a corruption occasioned by reckless determination to make not just a reasonable profit but all the profit that can be wrung from every enterprise. Our commonest man, emulating his superiors, forges ahead with a brick on the safety valve of his conscience. Think over your morning paper in that light."

"The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems — have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts."

"Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion."

"The blame for Armageddon lies on man. And the millennium will come only when the average man exhibits a scientific integrity about all he is and does — instead of half of it. Many a psychological Archimedes has put signposts on the hard road man must follow if he is to avoid self-destruction and come into his own. A few very great modern scientists have added to the lore. Indications of what man may expect of himself are everywhere at hand. But most men must first be persuaded that the task lies ahead and not behind — that we are infants still, with loaded guns for toys."

"Absolute dominion of a powerful people by a minority always produces national aggression."

"But we are as other men, exactly. Of one blood, one species, one brain, one figure, one fundamental set of collective instincts, one solitary body of information, one everything. Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national."

"The waiters all are rude. The bellboys scream and yell. The swill is better than the food. Goddamn the Mills Hotel."

"There is no advance without strife."

"Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not."

"There are in America from fifteen to twenty million religious fundamentalists who are dedicated to doctrines incompatible with democracy in that they insist on their prerogatives as first principles. An even larger group feebly follows the trail of fire breathed by those fundamentalists. They are the most dangerous minority we have because they categorically eschew the reasoned judgments of the majority. Democracy properly allows them the right to worship as they choose. It should never have conceded them the right to establish schools. Education is not a function of any church — or even of a city — or a state; it is a function of all mankind."

"What egotism, what stupid vanity, to suppose that a thing could not happen because you could not conceive it!"