Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

I do have faith in humanity but I don’t have faith in humans.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop the transacting of business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

Faith speaks when hope is disassembled; faith lives when hope dies dead.

I assume that a sufficiently skilled will be able to do anything not explicitly forbidden by the hardware.

Writing is very difficult. You have 120 pages of blank paper and it's like, "Go fill that up with some funny stuff," and that's challenging.

Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.

You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.

I think the most moving part of my trip [to Africa] so far was seeing 92-year-old Nelson Mandela, and just thinking about his life. This man has lived through a struggle that few nations have known.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.