Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

To have something does not mean to understand it.

An individual dies ... when instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being he cowers within and takes refuge there.

Our senses are always part of the process.

I've never been a social person. When I grew up, the other girls would all be combing their hair and exchanging lipstick, and I just couldn't do that group thing.

To be thoroughly and abidingly happy is not only to get what we all instinctively desire, but to fulfill the purpose of our nature.

Most of my guitars have been instruments that look cool. I'm not picky. I never think, 'Oh, this neck isn't made of ebony,' or, 'These strings don't feel correct.' It doesn't matter too much.

The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.

Oh well, no matter what happens, there's always death.

When you a 'has-been', just think of where you HAS-BEEN.

In the summer of 2009, I was at the Shakespeare lab at the public theater in New York.