“Everything is to protect you. I exist in case you need to be protected.”

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.

People with nothing to declare carry the most.

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn’t matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!

Silently the animal catches our glance. The animal looks at us, and whether we look away or not, we are exposed. Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness?

There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, “This is worthless. I’m wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this.” It happens all the time.

We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of the fire we suffered- our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure.

Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.

The bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive from life is something you have earned.

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.

Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.

What if God’s ‘NO,’ is really a gift? His way to protect us from what we cannot see, provide something better than we can imagine, or be part of the process of growing us closer to Him.

God save us from people who mean well.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

Anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny; for no power that is not limited by laws can ever be protected by them.

There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ’em all away from you. That’s never possible.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.