I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame—of everything.

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?

I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone —adults promising us their own failed future.

I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

What makes sense is not law, syntax, rules or structure

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

Even though it's not perceivable to the mind or senses, it's there and enlightenment is absolute freedom.

Live with your century; but do not be its creature.

Normally when a person has a stellar image another person's waiting in the wings to tear them apart. They're waiting for that one fatal flaw to expose itself.

If you cheat in the dark of the morning, you'll get found in the bright lights of the night.

When someone succeeded in quickly making a lot of money in America, people said he had made his fortune.

Let your first 'good morning' be to your Heavenly Father.

My own standards that I'll hold myself to is if the product that I'm making feels honest and it feels like I didn't compromise and it just came from an honest, correct place.