“I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen…It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.”

The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you,

…I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn’t have met, and who didn’t like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.

A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.

Some mistakes… Just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you.

You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?”

There is a hunger in you. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.

Oh, Clark,if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now.And I…i can’t live with that knowledge. I can’t. It’s Not who I am. I can’t be the kind of man who just…accepts.

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life–or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window.

Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?

I can’t do this because I can’t…I can’t be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this – this just becomes…another reminder of what I am not.

And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life…well, gradually became livable again.

Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.

Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa around, And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

Until we do something about wild dogs, kangaroos competing for pasture, your fortunes in life aren’t gonna turn around.

Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?

One preacher turned me on, another turned me off.

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like ‘thread’ or ‘exit.’

The principle of order in me, around me, and in the world… I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.