“Nature is not the number-one mystery, I’ve learned. It’s the heart that takes top honors.”

In high school, my desire for friendship far outweighed my talent for it.

Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

We grow too old to lose old friends.

Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

You know how a river goes on and on? That’s my love for you.

Nothing erodes [a mother’s love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.

Many men who transgress justice, honor appearance over reality.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

Well, honor is the subject of my story.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.

Honesty is the best policy. If I lose mine honor, I lose myself.

You should not honor men more than truth.