“Life goes on, even if two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark.”

The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.

When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.

That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries-the realists of a larger reality.

It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother.

What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

You can go home again…so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

I smiled and ran my hand through his dark curls. “So, Death, what do we do now?

I love love stories, no matter how dark.

There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are “like” someone in love sounds right.

This was pointed out to me by somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark.

If you can socialize from the privacy of your desk at night in a dark room, you can be a smoother, cooler, funnier, sexy, more everything person than you actually are in real life.

I’m not sure how to describe my style. A lot of my work is dark and looks a bit sad, which is strange because I’m such a smiley, over-the-top positive guy who wears gold shoes most days.

My soul gathers the breaths of my sanity and beholds them in the jar like fireflies on a dark night.

The only morality in a cruel world is chance.