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

My point is that there are a lot of forces, like the media and the general political rhetoric tells us we should have more. That we should do better than our parents and have a bigger house or a better car.

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.

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

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.

Out of life’s storm I carried only a few ideas – and not one feeling.

One must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.