If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.

He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.

Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.

Poetry = Anger x Imagination

If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.

I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.

We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye.

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad. Arnold, get mad.

Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

That's right, I am a book kisser.

I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.

I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.

Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.

She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

We're all travelling heavy with illusions.

You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191)

I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,' she used to say. 'Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.

Coach said. "the quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor".

I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb.

I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

Books and beer are the best and worst defense.

We only know how to lose and be lost.

Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.

I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.

I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.

You should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.

That's the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people.

She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.

He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous

At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time.

I'm a poet who can whine in meter

She told me that every other step was just for me.' But that's only half of the dance,' I said. Yeah,' my father said. 'She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain't healthy.