Philip Gulley

“In this polarized age, I don’t suspect a Republican or Democrat would lend the other a hand, let alone a printing press. But it was different back then, before talk radio gave the least stable among us a microphone.”

Everyone should be a teacher for one year to know what ingratitude feels like.

We could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we sent children outside barefoot, in a field of clover, while eating a PB&J, like parents did when I was a runt.

“While I’m clearing the air, I’ll add that their gay marriage harmed my traditional marriage exactly zero percent.”

I’ve buried quite a few stinkers these past 31 years, but you would never have known it from their funerals.

So far, the only downside to diabetes is not being able to eat Cinnabons at the airport.

My biggest worry about retirement isn’t how I’ll pay for it, but whether I should even do it. We’ve all heard stories about guys who retired and five minutes later dropped dead.

Some people shouldn’t take up religion, and you know the kind of people I mean—folks who are a few biscuits short of a breakfast.

As I write this, my wife and I are expecting our first grandchild, Madeline. The level of excitement, as you can imagine, is high.

Sometimes you have to live in a house for a while before she trusts you enough to reveal her secrets.

Perfectly decent human beings, like me for instance, are made to feel like losers for driving a 1999 Toyota Corolla.

The listing noted that the house was in a “Great Neighborhood!” I’m in that neighborhood, so it’s not all that great.

Being too concerned about protecting the natural world is like being too concerned about babies. How is it possible to be too concerned?

“You watch,” I told my wife back then. “The day will come when we’ll curse the person who invented cell phones.” That day is here.

Says Gulley, “A decade ago, I created the little town of Harmony, Indiana, filled it with Quakers, and sent them a pastor named Sam Gardner to see what would happen. The series of novels had a good run, but I wanted to dabble in theology and pursued that genre of writing for a while. I missed Sam and the Harmony crowd, though, and decided to see what they had been up to in the intervening years.”