“What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.”

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.

Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.

No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.

Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.

…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

One reason outfielders don’t have stronger arms might be they don’t practice as much as we did.

I might think they use a little bit too much oil; some people might think it’s a little dry. But the problem with al Qaeda is they want to kill us.

I am somehow inclined to move against this current, in search of what it might mean to be connected not just spiritually, but also vertically.

Google might be doping the horses.

The Medicare Part D prescription drug bill, which might be the most corrupt piece of legislation in history, was a huge giveaway of taxpayer funds to the big pharmaceutical companies.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work.

I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do.

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.