My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.

The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.

You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.

Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before.

To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.

Be fearless enough to let love transform you.

There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.

Think of what is pure.

Things of the world are not in a ‘seed’ form

Read! Write! Imagine! Create! Love! Live!

Our real reality is beyond the five senses.

Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.

Attending church is one thing, belonging is another.

If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.

All the gold in the world cannot buy a dying man one more breath--so what does that make today worth?