I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

Maybe forgiveness means you stop keeping tabs on those people. Wounds can't heal if you keep touching them.

If there's anything worse in this world than a bad batch of babi guling, it's hindsight.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.

Everything you want is cheap or free. If you went to a venture capitalist and said: "I need money to buy tools." You flunked the IQ test, I mean every tool that you need is free!

To me, freedom means having the power, the inherent right, the capacity and the ability to make choices that honour who I am.

The citizens of the United States have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.

Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.

Be like a flower and turn your face to the sun.

The book of nature is the book of fate. She turns the gigantic pages, leaf after leaf never returning one.