From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

Our piety must be weak and imperfect if it do not conquer our fear of death.

My fathers a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

You don't ever have to teach a kid to do wrong. You have to teach them to do right.

I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

Remember. Or, failing that, invent.

A good nail does not fear being hammered.

Our work is to keep our hearts open in hell.

And he dreamed the dream of all those who publish books, which was to have so much gold in your pockets that you would have to employ two people just to hold your trousers up.

Sisterly love is, of all sentiments, the most abstract. Nature does not grant it any functions.

Realism is condemned by those artists whose poverty of technique does not permit them to express it.