“There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.”

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I’m trying to do. I’m frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.

My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we’re living in, I put my faith in those people.

The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

In behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.

There’s so much to be afraid of.

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

The land gets inside of us; and we must decide one way or another what this means, what we will do about it.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. To be indifferent is to not express love.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.

You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

Alpha was the best thing I ever did. It helped answer some huge questions and to find a simple empowering faith in my life.

Sometimes I have young comics that ask me, “What should I do when I meet an agent or a manager and they ask me stuff?” And I say, “Well, they always usually ask, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years, 10 years, 15 years?’ And it’s good to have an answer for that.”

I’m glad God has all the answers, ’cause I barely understand the questions.

If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.

Confidence is overrated. It’s when we’re uncomfortable and looking for answers that we learn and grow the most.

Evolution answers some questions but reveals many more questions.

There is one question that I don’t think Gary Condit can answer, and that I think is why we all aimed at Gary Condit, besides the fact that he has a relationship.

I knew the answer, and–of course–so did Ramses. He has superb breath control and always gets in ahead of me.