Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.