When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

I went to India and was quite taken with it. There's a feeling there that things are holy first and useful second. And in America, we have it backwards.

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

We do not love anything more deeply than we love a story.

Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.