“Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us.”

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember,

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.

I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

I believe in using words, not fists. I believe in my outrage knowing people are living in boxes on the street. I believe in honesty. I believe in a good time. I believe in good food. I believe in sex.

Love and devotion are different words for a reason.

My heart is my muse my blood is my ink my pain is my pen my words are my healing.

Authenticity feels like the glue that has put me back together I feel whole and aligned in every word.

I pride myself on my words but honey, you leave me speechless.

You remind me of a poem I always wanted to write but never had the words to do so.