[On gardens:] I think they're sanctuaries for the mind and spirit. ... It's easy to feel wonder-struck in a garden, especially if you cultivate delight.

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime's loves.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

It's much easier to wear your pain on the outside...

The darn trouble with cleaning the house is it gets dirty the next day anyway so skip a week if you have to. The children are the most important thing.

Take me away from all this Death.

For the past two centuries, those who do not prize freedom have chipped away at every major clause of our Constitution until today we face a crisis of great dimensions.

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

If I'm going to break them, I'm going to break them both.

Pity is like lust ... both like to masquerade as love and it's powerfully hard to know the difference when you're in the throes of it.

It is a splendid thing to have the use of any gift of God. It isn't for us to choose again, or wonder and dispute, but just work in our own places, and leave the rest to God.

Angels and ministers of grace defend us.