Life itself is a quotation.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

The best-laid plans can fail for the lack of proper execution.

Grace is available to us from God, but it is located in our place of work

My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.

Obtain from yourself all that makes complaining useless. No longer implore from others what you yourself can obtain.

Among a hundred windows shining dully in the vast side of greater-than-palace number such-and-such one burns these several years, each night as if the room within were aflame.

There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.

Only when I focus on the holiness and glory of God am I able to see myself with accuracy.

We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organized society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill.

I grew up in athletics, where people keep score.

As you get older, you see how rapidly the years and decades fly by, so I would encourage anyone, no matter the age, to seize their life and be fully present.