Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.

It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.