Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

I think the hardest part of being a working mom is that I miss my kids a lot.

The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't.

Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason

Too many Americans live by Republican principles of faith, family, hope and opportunity, but vote for Democrats out of sheer habit.

Million bucks won't see you through a major health crisis.

I climbed down the outside of a Holiday Inn once just to surprise one of my crew by getting on his balcony and knocking on his window.

Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not