The first time my town saw the sky it sucker-punched us in the throat, left us breathless, said, I'm gonna keep you awake some nights without touching you. You'll make it up, the pain, you always do.

The future gets no say in who we are.

Pretend – inside your skin – you've got a friend, who's willing to give you everything you ever wanted in exchange for all you've ever been.

Stop inviting walls into wide open spaces.

What paper planes and empty seats most have in common is that they are best made by children still learning how to ride things out.

Hearts don't break, y'all. They bruise and get better.

I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day someone will pick me to make things better.

If you've never been rocked back by the presence of purpose this poem is too soon for you. Return to your mediocrity, plug it into an amplifier and rethink yourself.

If I didn't have so much of this life all wrong I would have gotten it right by now.

You are the home I point to that lives in my chest.

I'm ready to kill something. I'll probably only get as far as my brain cells, but I am going to kill them.

if you wanna make friends, you have to be hypocrite, but if you wanna have best friends you need to be honest to them

If fortune turns against you even jelly breaks your tooth.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

Our God, the Great Spirit, seems also to have forsaken us. Your God makes your people wax stronger every day. Soon they will fill all the land.

... justice is mercy's highest self.

I didn't join a band. I didn't start a band. I got asked to do it. It kinda happened by accident.

I work every day. Sometimes I don't accomplish anything every day, but if I don't work every day, I get depressed and get afraid to start again. So I do something every day.

I may not be able to change the world I see around me, but I can change the way I see the world within me.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

Of course there must be the urge, the indefinable longing to get something through into terms of plastic presentation, but results are nearly always unpredictable.