And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves...

In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren’t only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit.

What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have?

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

Whom God blesses he gives assignment

I've always said that you can't be the new Mel Blanc by doing Mel Blanc's voice.

Rats are just Ziploc bags full of disease.

The one that works the hardest comes out on top.

What a glorious thing is life, surrounded by the beauties of the world in which we live.

Growing up, I found I was good at two things: Art and Math. To hear my parents say it, though, it was only, 'John is good at Math.

There's no such thing as good weather, or bad weather. There's just weather and your attitude towards it.

It amazed me how some people could touch an instrument and create something so beautiful, and when others tried, like me, it just sounded like mangled noise.

I am happily married, and I think I was lucky that success came a little later in my life. It's difficult to handle all the attention when you are a young gun.

Experience what’s happening now, and make your surroundings real. You don’t have to invent an environment: it already exists.