Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.

How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?

The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs.

You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.

It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.

Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?

Each year one vicious habit discarded, in time might make the worst of us good.

America is a remarkable place in that social attitudes change almost imperceptibly, and then you wake up the next day and they've changed. But they've been changing all the time.

The Doors embodied—incarnated—a major upheaval in popular culture. Their music was of the times and it shaped the times.

The vast majority of people's concept of love is actually hate, more or less. “I need you, I must have you, I can't live without you, you're mine,” is all non-love.

We need to create incentives for our ranchers and farmers to manage their lands to maximize carbon sequestration.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.

What is the difference between the Christian God, and the gods of the other religions?" He simply, yet profoundly answered, "The main difference is this: The God of Christianity exists.

If you economically empower a woman, she represents enormous opportunity that can actually be transformative not only for her family and for her community, but at the aggregate level for the economy.

I'm not afraid of heights. I'm afraid of widths.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else