“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.

There were few who preferred honor to money.

Wouldn’t you want to be indicted by the govenment for a high crime? It’s a great thrill. It’s an honor. It’s a compliment. It’s fun. I’m enjoying every minute of it!

[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

An honorable death is better than a dishonorable life.

If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Let honor be to us as strong an obligation as necessity is to others.

If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.