You must not ever stop being whimsical.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.

Humans must experience suffering in order to comprehend the importance of their existence. -- Masaaki Hisakawa (Chapter 4)

Red blood is just so hard to clean up" "You would know" I snap remembering Shade. "Because no matter how hard you try to hid it I see it all over your hands

Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.

If we had been less reliant on technology and the security that we enjoy in being divorced from what we used to know, maybe things would have turned out differently.

President Bush fell off his bicycle this weekend and you know what was really sad? It's a stationary bike.

I think that where I've watched a movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

What I learned with Cecil Taylor was strategy and survival and how to resist temptations and resist getting discouraged.