The language of the poem is the language of particulars.

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.

Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.

Sometimes it's better for a struggling writer to stay single, than to keep hearing, "Oh, your a writer, and you need to spend time in writing? Then go marry your writing!

You numb yourself so you're not terrified when you're on TV at 7 o'clock in the morning with Justin Bieber, who you just met a couple of days before, having to perform in front of millions of people.

The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

I can be pretty nasty. Not 'mean' nasty, but nasty by your parents' standards. But not by my parents' standards, because my parents were nasty for their day.

People have the right to say what they want to.

The garden of Eden was a boggy swamp just south of Croydon. You can see it over there.

The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance.

Kosovo is not a part of Serbia. It is the very heart of Serbia.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.