Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

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.

If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.

One must indeed test the strings to this life, bounce the bow, wet the mouthpiece, prepare for the deeper music that follows.

And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will.

You can't always just put color filters in 80s aerobic videos or take stuff from public-access and look at it in this very ironic, self-conscious way. That only takes you so far.

Tis a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.

Ya know, if you treat every comic the way you treated me tonight, you would never see a bad show.

My philosophy is that to be a director you cannot be subject to anyone, even the head of the studio. I threatened to quit each time I didn't get my way, but no one ever let me walk out.

Do your squats eat, your vegetables, wear red lipstick, [and] don't let boys be mean to you.

If you have inner peace, nobody can force you to be a slave to the outer reality.

He laughed. I suddenly wanted to laugh, to laugh with him, to sit here, or maybe outside in the rain, and just laugh with him. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even smile.