It was so rare to find someone who was both so young and so wise, both so fresh and so jaded.
I used language because I wanted to offer content that people - not necessarily art people - could understand.
The most profound things are inexpressible.
Everyone's work is equally important.
I was hesitant to approach people. I'm socially awkward. But I was working on a number of memorials, and finally it dawned on me: These are memorials to people who wrote, so I should use their writing. That's how I started to quit.
Turn soft and lovely any time you have a chance
The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration. If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.
A sermon often does a man most good when it makes him most angry. Those people who walk down the aisles and say, "I will never hear that man again," very often have an arrow rankling in their breast.
Vertue flies from the heart of a Mercenary man.
When one crosses over from an activity, or the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I think that is an act of supreme self-consciousness that I've never, in effect, made. I write, but I don't like to think of myself as a writer. I think it's somewhat self-aggrandizing and pretentious. Now, I am a teacher.
Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.