“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.

I love sushi, I love fried chicken, I love steak. But there is a limit to my love.

Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly is there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?

Friendship must never be buried under the weight of misunderstanding.

Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.

Most people die at age 25 and are buried at age 65.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.

Your magic is too golden, too sky-opening, too hearts-bursting to be buried quietly away.

With work and life, your true depth can become an alien thing to you. Your gut feelings, your instincts become buried.

After traveling through fourteen foreign countries and appearing before all the royalty and nobility I have only one wish today. That is that when my eyes are closed in death that they will bury me back in that quiet little farm land where I was born.