Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

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.

She says that each of us has his or her role in life, and if we know ourselves well enough to understand what that role is, we will be happy doing nothing but what we can do best.

Conviction, then, is no part of a sinner’s salvation—but the clear practical knowledge of the fact that he cannot save himself, and is entirely dependent on the saving grace of God.

Beauty really has to do with the way a person carries it off

The power of the leader is given to him by the people, so he has a duty to engage and listen more attentively and carefully to the aspirations of the people.

No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.

People settle for so much less because they find their identities in the world's fickle and untrue opinions. God made you royal with His blood. Live.

I have an eye for new and refreshing talent.

God is not a supporting actor in our life movie. We exist for his purposes, not the other way around.

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

I realize it's probably best to keep my politics to myself.