“It isn't true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times, if you know how.”

“But the inside stuff Isn't in these poems About how to be a REAL HUMAN BEING Because no one can tell you that Except you. Because the you of you Is inside you someplace Probably in the middle of your heart. You can feel it there. And the you in you ALWAYS knows when you're being a REAL HUMAN BEING You know what I mean. And don't let anyone tell you different.”

“Relationships are physics. Time transforms things- it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you'r put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I started riding Einstein's famous theoretical bus. Here's my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you're riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you'll actually live though less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But where you're on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of the world out those rhomboidial coach windows, the same trip will take just under twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It's hard to fathom. But I think it's exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it's just a day that repeats. You and your partner age at the same clip; it seems not time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship- when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes- do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics.”

“Sometime on a bright blue day When everything is very clear And there are no wrinkles in the sky It's good to go to a quiet place And lie down on your back and look at the world Or put your face deep in the grass And your arms around the ground And remember how it was when you were little And remember you're still the same you Only you got bigger on the outside is all that happened.”

“When you are absolutely, positively sure you know all there is to know about anything, you're as far from the truth as you will ever be...”

“There are no environments where you're only going to win, because life just isn't like that.”

“I tried to convince myself once, when I was a teenager, that I felt God. Alone in the sanctuary, accompanying my mom on an evening errand to the church. I stared at the ceiling and drew deep breath as quickly as I could. I told our youth minister in his ball cap that I had felt Him. That I was blessed. But in the end, it was only the wind and the rain, making noise in the darkness.”