“Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?”

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.

It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, ‘Here, I guess, since this is where I am.’

It is not a case of whether we want to wash our hands of Europe or want to help her to regain her feet. The troubles of Europe have been laid on our doorstep, so to speak, and will plague us, if we do nothing to cure them, whether we like it or not.

I realize we’re not promised tomorrow. Believe me, I realize that. But if God blesses me and lets me stay, I love my life so much, it is such a good life. I am eager to throw myself at His feet, but I don’t want to get on the first busload that is going.

Trials make the promise sweet, Trials give new life to prayer; Trials bring me to His feet, Lay me low, and keep me there.

As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.

Don’t look too far ahead or you’ll get overwhelmed. Just do the next apparent thing. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. You’ll get through this. And when you do, you’ll feel great!

This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, ‘Okay, that happened, and I did not die.’ You’ve got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

If you can’t feel, why did you kiss me?” patch traced a finger along my collarbone, then headed south stopping at my heart. I felt it pounding through my skin. “because i feel it here, in my heart,” he said quietly.