Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

I'm a happy guy. I just want to see people laugh and smile.

I love 'Boardwalk Empire.' I really love that world. I love that style. I love all the actors on it.

Honey, we all got to go sometime, reason or no reason. Dying's as natural as living. The man who's too afraid to die is too afraid to live.

I'd rather be in the heart of Africa in the will of God, than on the throne of England, out of the will of God.

When one begins to turn in bed, it is time to get up.

Winning begins at home. It begins with your thoughts and your actions.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.

I think that one of the tasks of feminist women - mainly women of culture - in our time is to seek out those women who were only forgotten because they were women.

As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and ... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.