Look at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.

Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.

I think that very often younger writers don't appreciate how much hard work is involved in writing. The part of writing that's magic is the thinnest rind on the world of creation. Most of a writer's life is just work. It happens to be a kind of work that the writer finds fulfilling in the same way that a watchmaker can happily spend countless hours fiddling over the tiny cogs and bits of wire. ... I think the people who end up being writers are people who don't get bored doing that kind of tight focus in small areas.

Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.

No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.

There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.