Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Adult bats don't weigh much. They're mainly fur and appetite.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.

The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world. ... they bring the world into focus, they corral ideas, they hone thoughts, they paint watercolors of perception.

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?