It is what I was born for - to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world - to instruct myself over and over.

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.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young...

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.

The strength of our economy allows us to maintain the mightiest military in the world, effectively enforcing a Pax Americana.

Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.

How could I live without powder?

Do I know what rhetorical means?

Hatred is keener than friendship, less keen than love.

You're either in a position of abundance or you're in a position of poverty. Now, that's every area of your life. That's not just financially.

People have doubted me and criticized me my whole life, and that's why I'm the way I am.