“You do not have to utter anything you do not want to utter,” I told her, and she said, “Then I would never utter another word again.” “You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” “Then I would never do anything again.”

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

I put my hand on the doorknob because I thought maybe her hand was on the doorknob on the other side.

Every night before putting her to sleep, Yankel counts her ribs, as if one might have disappeared in the course of the day and become the seed and soil for some new companion to steal her away from him.

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster’s paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame. Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

She extended a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.

There are only some many times you can utter “It does not hurt” before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt.

We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don’t care if we’re lying. I am a bad person. I don’t care. I don’t care what you are.

While it is always possible to wake a person who’s sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.

There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

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

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.