This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.

Chair or no chair: a binary relation. But the vicissitudes of moving the body around are infinite. You never know what a person in a chair can do.

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little.

If you think something's happened quickly, you're looking at only a part of it.

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

Time punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us - by taking everything

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

It is. I’m your boyfriend now, whichmeans there’s no room for your hipster admirer. He’ll just have to lick his wounds while we lick other things.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

Herr Schiller? Are there really any such things as ghosts?' The old man did not even show surprise at the question. He heaved a sigh. 'Yes Pia, there are. But never the ones you expect.

In the winter of 2012, as my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to write what turned into my autobiography, a look at my own life through the lens of food.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

I've always said I write albums; I don't write random songs and then sort them out.

She [Hillary Clinton] is actually got the track record for doing the crazy things that Donald Trump talks about.

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

Love is a condition where the world seems to be standing still, and it's you who are spinning on your axis.

And when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.