“It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can’t people say what they mean at the time?”

I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.

In the morning, when the nothing vase casts a something shadow, like the memory of someone you’ve lost, what can you say about that?

This is my heart. You are touching it with your left hand. You are touching it with your left hand, not because you are left-handed, although you might be, but because I am holding it against my heart. What you are feeling is the beating of my heart. It is what keeps me alive.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

Words never mean what we want them to mean.

If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

The only thing more painful than being an active forgetter is to be an inert rememberer.

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values-or betray them-lies in the food we put on our plates.

I do think ordinariness is, in a way, the enemy, but not ordinariness as the opposite of flamboyance.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.

I got incredibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is, and how, compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn’t even matter if I existed at all.

You are the only one who has understood even a whisper of me, and I will tell you that I am the only person who has understood even a whisper of you.

It’s not the imbalances of life that will get you down-it’s doing meaningless things that aren’t taking you where you want to go.

Life was never meant to be safe. It was meant to be lived right to the end.

Men will surrender to the spirit of the age. They will say that if they had lived in our day, faith would be simple and easy. But in their day, they will say, things are complex; the Church must be brought up to date and made meaningful to the day’s problems.

What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you’d like it to mean?

A life filled with silly social drama and gossip indicates that a person is disconnected from purpose and lacking meaningful goals. People on a path of purpose don’t have time for drama.

Sometimes it’s not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don’t mean.

When we’re living as amateurs, we’re running away from our calling – meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.