I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.
We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.
But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.
Selves will accumulate when one isn’t looking, and they don’t always act wisely or well.
Each photograph is a magic lamp rubbed by the mind.
Without memories we wouldn’t know who we are, how we once were, who we’d like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories.
I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.
I am a great fan of the universe, which I take literally: as one. All of it interests me, and it interests me in detail.
Give a man enough rope and he’ll wrap himself around your little finger.
Nature is also great fun. To pretend that nature isn’t fun is to miss much of the joy of being alive.
Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.
Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.
Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.
The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime’s loves.
When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call “white” is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.