I know it sounds silly, but disrespecting a dead writer by sitting in a chair that probably never belonged to him still felt like a risk to me. So I chickened out.

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

Inclusiveness isn't what I want to push back against. The obsession with facts is.

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

In some ways we want definitions that can help protect our own interpretations of the genre.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.

What I didn't realize when I was in school and what I suspect a lot of young writers today don't get either is that you have to create the world that you want to exist in as an artist.

Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

A risk is something that feels risky to the person who's taking it.

One act of kindness teaches more about the love of Jesus than the words I speak.

Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence.

This is life, we look but we don't see, and we hear but we don't learn.

The space shuttle is a better and safer rocket than it was before the Challenger accident.

My soul has learned yet more fully than ever, this day, that there is no satisfaction to be found in earthly things-God alone can give rest to my spirit.

I've developed several serious policy proposals to create jobs, reform Washington and reduce spending.

Museums do not share their collections with other museums unless they get something in exchange. The Metropolitan will deal with the Louvre, but will they send their stuff to Memphis? No.

If you are not where you want to be DO NOT QUIT, instead reinvent yourself and change your habits.

Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.

You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.