Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.

It’s unfortunate really—how everyone can live on the same soil yet not even know the first thing about their neighbors.

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.

Give and you shall receive, much more that you ever thought possible. Give and give again. People who give will never be poor!

There is no dream, and if there is, there is only one to see you my children struggling for the same and for which I am expected to be finished.

I felt the sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry.

Having faith often means doing what others see as crazy.

Over the years, you grow up, you mature and you see things in a different way, and it's reflected in the writing.

When one has not father, or mother, or brother, and all one's friends have barely bread enough for themselves, life cannot be very easy, nor its crusts very many at any time.

I have both sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation, which are both debilitating conditions.