Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

You will fall short of achieving your goals if your focus is fragmented and your attention, energy, and concentration diversified.

The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.

It’s not what you get, but what you give that is God’s true measure of a life.

Don't be scared to try and fail

Spend less than you make; always be saving something. Put it into a tax-deferred account. Over time, it will begin to amount to something. This is such a no-brainer.

Careerism is the determination to reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.

It's quite fun to fight them, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling.

She had always maintained a cynical facade, using it as a defence against embarrassment, fear, loneliness… but at the moment she felt unusually vulnerable.

I don't really think about what the subject of my next album will be. I just know that I'm going to make another album.

I'm God's messenger from the gypsy tent. And it's the message that's important, not the messenger.