Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn't stop each other on the street to say I love you.

His voice was handsome and broken, like a cobblestone street.

To feel alone is to be alone.

Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.

Wen life gives you hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.

I cannot say this too strongly: Do not compare yourselves to others. Be true to who you are, and continue to learn with all your might.

I respect people who hate me honestly.

The colors of light are infinite through refraction, yet they all come from the same source. Thus I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul, nor fail to identify with the most virtuous.

Parents can't indulge our fears. We're supposed to make our kids feel safe, even if we don't feel safe ourselves.

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

The rest of what I learned about baseball came from Peter Gammons, the Boston Globe's best baseball writer when I was in high school.

A woman should have the ballot, because without this responsibility she cannot best develop her moral courage.

Every day, first responders put their own lives on the line to ensure our safety. The least we can do is make sure they have the tools to protect and serve their communities.

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.