To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

One of the principle qualities of pain is that it demands an explanation.

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible.

Under the seams runs the pain.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.

If your way of life is writing, then everything that happens becomes a sentence.

In every historical period, the religious groups that grow most rapidly are those that set believers at odds with the surrounding culture.

I have known some quite good people who were unhappy but never an interested person who was unhappy.

Our best today; better tomorrow.

I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that.

So it’s really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.

There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

It's that invasive and puerile curiosity to feed a tabloid culture. I don't subscribe to it.

Our job is to ask questions of children so that children internalize these questions and ask them of themselves and their own emerging drafts.

You can make yourself enthusiastic by affirming enthusiasm and by thinking, talking, acting enthusiastic.

I am committed to strengthening our agricultural economy by protecting the unique interests of small and medium size family farms so that they can continue to operate.