“What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.”

“I know many lives worth living.”

“Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?”

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.”

“But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. ”

“Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.”

“I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us...”

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

“Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.”

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.”

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything - other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion - that standing within this otherness - the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books - can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”

“it is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.”

“It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.”

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

“Words are the vibrations of nature. Therefore, beautiful words create beautiful nature. Ugly words create ugly nature. This is the root of the universe.”

“Life is love, a gift from god and parent, death is gratitude for a new dimension”

"If you, free as you are of every weight had stayed below, then that would be as strange as living flame on earth remaining still." And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens."

"This mountain’s of such sort that climbing it is hardest at the start; but as we rise, the slope grows less unkind."

"Until he shall have driven her back to Hell,"

"Be as a tower, that, firmly set, Shakes not its top for any blast that blows!"

"Now our minds are like smoke, then they shall be like fire."

"And I was told about this torture, that it was the Hell of carnal sins when reasons give way to desire."