Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.

Poetry doesn’t pay. But I need it. And so do you.

In our very ordinariness', we are capable of extraordinary actions

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself.

The more I live, the more I think that humor is the saving sense.

I think the hardest thing is losing weight. That's the hardest thing more than anything else.

I'm not political. I just want America to do well, I want the world to do well. I want everyone to stop fighting.

I never, in any city I've ever been in, never remember the names of streets. The longest place I ever lived in was for five years and I didn't know the name of the next street over.

The biggest thing that has happened to hip-hop is the clinging on to the corporation as the all-mighty hub of the music.

When you were born, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood.