We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

Sometimes the greatest difference between being a boy and being a man is restraint.

So there are many things outside of your control. Why not create positive control over the other things and add greater value to those?

Before I knew escape, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.

There may be ways in which we can work for change. We don't have to do dramatic things or devote our entire lives to it. We can lead normal lives but at the same time try hard not to be bystanders.

I believe that anybody who gets married should go to a counselor for months before the wedding. I think that's going to save guys a lot of money and the ladies a lot of heartbreak.

If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years... we would not have had the kind of job growth we've had.

Just because life's meaningless doesn't mean we can't experience it meaningfully.

Our lives are composed of a finite set of moments that we choose how to spend.

I buy things with the best of intention of living in them and then life intercedes.

Suddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door. She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side. Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.