Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

When people fall in love, they burst into flames.

People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn't. It continues and is ever-changing.

You have to see the miracles for there to be miracles.

I have to go, " I say, helpless.What makes you say the opposite of what every cell in your body wants you to say?

it's okay to be addicted to beauty, " Mom says, all dreamy. "Emerson said 'beauty is God's handwriting.

Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs.

The worst thing that could ever happen to Noah has happened. He's become normal.

SELF PORTRAIT: Throwing Armfuls of Air into the Air

And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes.

Nor that he's regarding my face with the same intensity I am his. We're two paintings staring at each other across a room.

Some people just need to read and think, to spend time alone sorting through the stories in their heads

The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.

The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks.

Once you get older, people stop listening to what you say. It's very agreeable once you get used to it.

My daughter genuinely asked me to hand her the basketball bat. I might be failing as a father.

Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of. Quick: try to think of a single movie about the horrors of Stalinism. This is not a failure of imagination. This is moral meltdown.

To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.

Despite what some would have us believe, success is not built on resentment and fear.

To become what you are not, behave as you do not.

One of the premises of parenting might be that the job of parents is to teach their kids to get along without them.