ROBERT JAMES WALLER

Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.

Life is never easy for those who dream.

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.

And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies.

It's kind of strange-- in fiction you get to tell lies and are applauded for it.

The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.

I sometimes have the feeling you've been here a long time, more than one lifetime, and that you've dwelt in private places none of the rest of us has even dreamed about.

The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces.

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them.

Complex things are easy to do. Simplicity's the real challenge.

I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea

Once a person knows a kiss and a kind word, you can't blame him for never wanting to live without them again. - "The Bridges of Madison County"

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.

It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.

Such physical matters were nice, yet, to him, intelligence and passion born of living, the ability to move and be moved by subtleties of the mind and spirit, were what really counted.

Anyone who can feel that way about a woman is worth lovin himself.

When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected move again only you don't remember what moves you because no-one has asked in so long. Not even yourself.

An inherent kindness exists in the process of aging ... we are allowed to move along gradually.

if only we lost our minds and arrived at our hearts

This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime!

We're all getting lashed to the great wheel of uniformity.

The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

First you must have the images, then come the words.

We have both lost ourselves and created something else, something that exists only as an interlacing of the two of us.

For we have come by different ways to this place... I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak with waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.