At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.

Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.

I was once a man, not a great man, not a saintly man, but a good man, and a man nonetheless.

Reading can only take you so far, up to the moment where you must take action with your own hands

Our tears are precious, necessary, and part of what make us such endearing creatures.

Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers.

It's time to put country ahead of party. It's time to put the next generation ahead of the next election.

Holding on to painful images of the past in order to avoid painful experiences in the future serves only to color the present with pain.

I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.

I want Americans to know that Guantánamo​ happened not to monsters, but to men. Innocent men.

I don't cover my face because I want to show my identity.

I'm a nice guy to anyone I meet, until they show me they don't deserve niceness. I'll turn very quickly. But I'm pretty pleasant overall.