Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.
Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted.
The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, 'Daddy, I need to ask you something,' he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.
Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.
God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.
A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded pistol on your coffee table - There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about it.
Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Lake Wobegon, the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
I'm not busy... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.
I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.
