Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?

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.

Love is a relative emotional quality

The feeling or emotion of happiness or joy is always momentary, but it’s only your imaginations, that extend your momentary happiness, for some more time.

If someone can handle you at your worst, they'll stick around for your best.

In the defense of civil liberties there can be no exceptions, or there will soon be many.

I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

I was always looking for a career that could combine my creative interests with my technical side, and it ends up directing films is the perfect combination.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no nation should ever require its citizens to be that brave.

I have an abiding faith in the fact that time will change the value of photographs. What you see today may be so familiar to everyone that they don't immediately appreciate or value it.