We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.

I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

I was once a man, not a great man, not a saintly man, but a good man, and a man nonetheless.

Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.

Their friendship was more important than any relationship. Guys would come and go; girlfriends were forever.

I have to say that my husband and my children are so tough, there really is no space for pretension.

Solitude is strength; to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.

Between children and parents there is a difficulty of seeing each other simply as people.

Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.