Nothing much bothered you for a while and you kept walking like a silhouette through this town, saying hi's and goodbyes, acting polite at all times. But there is no fire in your heart; you are not...

We are born with the innate capacity to express empathy. Experiencing our own cuts and bruises, encountering our own difficulties and disappointments, expands our cognitive world and rouses the...

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

The heart's seasons seldom coincide with the calendar. Who among us has not been made desolate beyond all words upon some golden day when the little creatures of the air and meadow were life...

For a pregnant woman to give birth, she's gotta feel the pain of pulling a watermelon out of her nostril. For an Artist to create a masterpiece, he's gotta feel the pain of pulling entire galaxies out...

In effect, painting is the still memory of {the artist's} human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person...

Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness.

Out of all the things that look & bleed, the most bruised is a man who has seen his dreams crushed and experienced miserable hopelessness.

And yet he found comfort in the absence of telling.

Gravity disappears again, and we rise up off the floor like spooks from a grave. It's like the Rapture in here every thirty seconds.

Misery teaches you the value of joy. It reveals to you the gravitas of human life.

with static electricity

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

In the sense of movement a boat is a living thing

There would be no sequel to the sadness

So this is pain. So this is wretchedness. So this is misery. I never knew.

Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.

Many of Juan Diego's demons had been his childhood companions - he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.

Lately whenever I'd scratched somebody's surface I'd turned up a ghost story.

Oh, darling, I've been so miserable.

Even when there's no interest on either side, one's coordination completely disappears in the presence of beauty. {Abigail's daughter, Jen}

Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.

What the war did to dreamers

He thought his heart would kill him, he'd had no clue what it was capable of.

one of her recent letters asks, Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? {Perhaps it is, but I suspect she's not actually counting on me for an answer.}

I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me.

In point of fact, she had never looked as well. She had entered her room as just an impossibly lovely girl. The woman who emerged was a trifle thinner, a great deal wiser, an ocean sadder. This one...

What I said to God through my gasping sobs was something like this: 'Hello, God. How are you? I'm Liz. It's nice to meet you.' That's right - I was speaking to the creator of the universe as though...

Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straight way had been lost.