"If you ever doubt the power of language, listen more closely. Witness the magic the first time someone whispers “i love you.” Watch a woman put on head phones, close her eyes, and have her life changed by a lyric. See a bad moment flipped upside down by a well timed joke. Words propel us, empower us, make us human and more than human. We constantly struggle to say what we mean and mean what we say. To “wrestle with words and meanings.” that’s what t.s. eliot calls it. But as we whisper and shout, stutter and spin, we create order out of the chaos around us. We are built of words, and we live by them, too."

"Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?"

"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid."

"Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet."

"Someday, somewhere- anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life."