“Otherwise it was quiet—that eerie, not-quite-comforting quiet one finds in small towns before dawn.”

“Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another.”

“It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town, out on the edge of the prairie…”

“If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us…”

“I saw old-fashioned cities, quiet streets, small shops, colorful flags and ornaments and decorations—life before machine guns, before communism and capitalism and the ambitions of generals.”

“You can keep as quiet as you like, but one of these days somebody is going to find you.”

“When one gets quiet, then something wakes up inside one, something happy and quiet like the stars.”

“Finding true silence requires more than quieting our surroundings. It also means quieting our souls. This is the real dilemma of living in a wordy world.”

“You've been quiet lately… but it's not so much the quiet as something inside the quiet.”

“Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.”