“To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.”

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

“If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?”

“Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it.”

“Out of your whole life give but a moment!All of your life that has gone before,All to come after it, -so you ignore,So you make perfect the present, condense,In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,Thought and feeling and soul and sense. ”

“You were made perfectly to be loved and surely I have loved you in the idea of you my whole life long. ”