“Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.”

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers.

O my heart! Love God as the chatrik loves the rain drops, Who even when fountains are full and the land green, Is not satisfied as long as it cannot get a drop of rain.

He is a perpetual fountain of good sense.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.

The Holy Spirit is just as truly in us when He makes no sign as when the fountains of joy are overflowing, or the waters of peace are softly refreshing our weary and troubled heart.

The fact is, we are leaky vessels, and we have to keep right under the fountain all the time to keep full of Christ, and so have fresh supply.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.