When allowed to return to the class, your feelings of humility and lonesomeness will render you a much finer student and person.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.

... the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

To understand Jesus when he stated that he was the way, the truth and the life, one must first recognize his manner of a walk and believe firmly that his manner is true.

I didn't know how you'd get us out of that last one. But you did. You were good.

Abandoning civil society will leave the enemy in control, not by victory but by default.

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

To me, Texas is Austin, a bunch of cool people trying to make a difference.

Now I worry. If people ended up liking me, did I do the job wrong? So I decided they didn't end up liking me - they ended up being able to deal with me.

I don't think I've lost a beat at all. Because of my physique and my look...I fit in the natural action-hero role.

They who see only what they wish to see in those around them are very fortunate.

Internal security means something. It means war against your own population.

"You need hedges.""Hedges," I said, bemused. "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night."