I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it?

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

To feel alone is to be alone.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

We can build a collective civic space large enough for all our separate identities, that we can be E Pluribus Unum - Out of One, Many.

A man's behavior is the index of the man, and his discourse is the index of his understanding.

It is usually the case with most men that their nature is so constituted that they pity those who fare badly and envy those who fare well.

Gratitude is a soil on which joy thrives.

A billion years or so into eternity, how many toys we accumulated during this life will not seem too terribly important.

I like to focus on what I'm doing now, which is giving back. I've done interventions with people I've been close to.

My favorite food is deep-fried ravioli. I always get that every year.

I can't imagine ever going back to working with somebody else.

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals