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

"Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time."

"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between."

"Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world."

"Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves."

"I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life."

"Libraries change lives. They are the soul of a people."

"Of all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite"

"There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore."

"I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory"

"Love seems to be as Essential as Sunlight"

"Which is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?"

"And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives."

"To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit."

"Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points."

"For me, life offers so many complexly appealing moments that two beautiful objects may be equally beautiful for different reasons and at different times. How can one choose?"

"Love is like a batik created from many emotional colors, it is a fabric whose pattern and brightness may vary."

"Fear is danger to your body, but disgust is danger to your soul."

"We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention"

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

"How can love's spaciousness be conveyed in the narrow confines of one syllable?"

"The daftest logic brings such sweet unrest."

"Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They're never total fits or misfits. ... We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children .... [p. 15]"

"Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser."

"Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm."

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

"No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae."

"But who can say why two people become a couple, that small principality of mutual protection and regard? Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points."

"Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution."

"For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly."

"God may promise not to destroy creation, but it is not a promise humankind made - to our peril."

"It's like having a head full of holes, in which the perfect repository of words have shamed themselves," he lamented."

"Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it's mystifying and scarcely believed."

"Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history."

"Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90"

"The Germans have removed, murdered or burned alive tens of thousands of Jews. Out of the three million Polsih Jews, no more than 10 percent remain."

"Every day our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death."

"Antonina felt convinced that people needed to connect more with their animal nature, but also that animals long for human company, reach out for human attention."

"Our lives together, our duet, also continues to evolve, and even if we can’t go back to how it was, we’re designing a good life for us, in spite of everything."

"It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a rare and beautiful country lies in between."

"Listen, I'd rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!"

"In the early years of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horse meat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats and birds."

"A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn't be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives."

"I do feel responsible. He used to be able to look after himself. Now he can't. That's so different, so strange. The big question is: Is more improvement really possible, or should I stop pushing him?' [p. 153]"

"Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my form of inquiry."

"There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us."

"They spend their whole lives yelling at the world and each other. They yell at their loved ones, they yell at their enemies, they yell at their dinner, they yell at the big bustling world."

"What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be?"

"The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern."

"Without memories we wouldn't know who we are, how we once were, who we'd like to be in the memorable future. We are the sum of our memories."