“How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.”

“Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.”

“Strength is a matter of the made up mind.”

“I am not defeated.”

“Skill and confidence are an unconquered army.”

“You live out the confusions until they become clear.”

“I will either find a way, or make one.”

“Character is power.”

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”

“Regrets only apply when we don’t learn from a situation. No sense looking back: look forward with new knowledge and no regret.”

“Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.”

“There’s a whole universe in every single thing.”

“I learned that you have to push away the demand of people’s expectations by believing in your instincts.”

“You were once wild. Don’t let them tame you.”

“Joy is that kind of happiness that does not depend on what happens.”

“Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra—they’ll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.”

“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant with the weak and wrong. Sometime in your life, you will have been all of these.”

“Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden — in all the places.”

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

“The people we love are built into us.”

“Endure, and keep yourselves for days of happiness.”

“Listening well is a superpower.”

“Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.”

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

“There’s a trick to the Graceful Exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, a relationship is over — and to let go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on rather than out.”

“Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don’t just survive. Celebrate.”

“How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world! How wonderful it is that everyone, great and small, can immediately help bring about justice by giving of themselves!”

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.”

“My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.”

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”

“The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

“We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

“The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it; ignorance may deride it; malice may distort it, but there it is.”

“Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.”

“The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.”

“The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against.”

“In all things it is better to hope than to despair.”

“We must travel in the direction of our fear.”

“The first step toward transforming your life into art is to start paying more attention to it.”

“Instead of gathering up the “real smart young men” gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life, and be amply repaid both by their success and unforgetfulness of those that held out the helping hand.”

“Whatever seed you are, bloom.”

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

“You didn’t just find a self out there waiting — you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be.”

“My heart is in my mind. I think this is why I am an artist.”

“I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or books; I’m beginning to hear the teaching of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn’t pleasant, it’s not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.”

“Scream
so that one day
a hundred years from now
another sister will not have to
dry her tears wondering where
in history she lost her voice”

“The Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the Blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

“Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings - stronger than hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.”

“Personal meaning lies at the confluence of your passions and your heartbreak.”

“When will you learn that there isn’t a word for everything?”

“Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.”

“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.”

“History teaches that our difficulties are not new.”

“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”

“All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.”

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

“Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.”

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

“Beauty will save the world.”

“Stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.”

“What a curious power words have.”

“A writer is a world trapped in a person.”

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c, anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.”

“Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence...be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”

“I believe that we are arks of the covenant and our true nature is not rage or deceit or terror or logic or craft or even sorrow. It is longing.”

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

“We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.”