I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin

Our lives are spent sailing in the mist, hoping for a burst of sunlight that can make sense of who we are.

Think about finding out when you're 13 that your dad is not your dad. It's like, okay, take it on the chin and keep going. No choice, really.

Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.

Somehow pictures always lead to people as masses. Books belong to individuals.

It is strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world.

The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.

Genuine wisdom is usually conspicuous through modesty and silence.

Men feel like they can be a professional and a father. For women it's "or." That's offensive to me. The concept that it's not possible is crazy.

The history of man that you don't know is what your unconscious is made out of.