“I tried the key in all the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, becuase I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder.”

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.

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.

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.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.

It’s very hard to grow because it’s difficult to let go of the models of ourselves in which we’ve invested so heavily.

I fall in love every time. And I don’t really fall in love a lot, but when I do, I fall hard.

I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.

It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.