To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. Its always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact its so supple and sly.