"Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well."

"I have lived, and I have run the course which fortune allotted me; and now my shade shall descend illustrious to the grave."

"My intent was to carry out my duty as a doctor, to end their suffering. Unfortunately, that entailed, in their cases, ending of the life."

"Be in love with your life, every detail of it."

"Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation...15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old."

"My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction."

"Life happens at intersections."

"Twitter has been my life's work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what's going on in them right now."

"I feel like unforgiveness, bitterness and resentment, it blocks the flows of God's blessings in life."

"All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world."

"What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?"

"For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology."

"From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth."

"The mistake the two of us made,’ I said, ‘was that we skimped the foreplay. I’m not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless."

"...we are on the road from no A to no B in the world..."

"Truth is not spoken in anger.Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love."

"This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!"

"It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways."

"If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like."

"Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence."

"To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy."

"The sun's touch is kind."

"...So that someone might want to put you in a book...So that you may be worth putting in a book...Live like a hero...Be a main character. Otherwise, what is life for?"

"Empire as located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe."