She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.

Time heals what reason cannot.

What... are you?" she choked out. "No sunlight. Funky choppers." he inhaled raggedly. "Take a guess.

On the Morning of Christ's Nativity Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep, was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.

You are my mate, Ria. In my soul. You are my mate. ~ Mercury

Against classical philosophy: thinking about eternity or the immensity of the universe does not lessen my unhappiness.

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

If you always have to be watching yourself and judging, I don't think you're as free.

Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years.

But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past.