"Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out."

"Without duty, life is sort of boneless; it cannot hold itself together."

"There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it."

"This Forest eats itself and lives forever."

"If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."

"You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own."

"He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life."

"Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not."

"She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on."

"The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof."

"I don't want to be a leader. I want to be one who goes around with a little oil can and offer help when I see a breakdown."

"Claudia's the sort of girl who goes through life holding onto the sides."

"This perhaps is what is meant by hiraeth: a lifelong yearning for what is gona and out of reach."

"It’s just life. You can’t beat life."

"There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done."

"Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class."

"And now such a warm commotion, such busy love."

"He was evidently the sort of person who posed questions that were traps for you to fall into."

"What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given."

"Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?"

"We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do--we do it all the time."

"You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never."

"Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person."

"What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it"."