Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.

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.

If one can know how good a city is by its smell, one should know how good a society is by the women's status.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

I’d heard he had started a fistfight in one of the seedier local taverns because someone had insisted on saying the word “utilize” instead of “use.

He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.

a city is all about how you look at it

There is no private domain of a person's life that is not political, and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal.

The Tree of Knowledge grew fast by, Knowledge of Good bought dear by knowing ill.

Terrorism needs to be fought against and certainly delegitimized or attacked, but some of the underlying grievances that might in fact lead individuals astray to terrorism cannot be ignored.

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.