There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.
Just one look and then I knew that all I longed for long ago was you
I will be so glad for you to hear not the sounds of gunfire but the sounds of church bells, and of people working in peace.
There I was, waiting, afraid I’d never experience the kind of joy yet to come, but hoping for it just the same.
How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?
There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.
You are born into your family and your family is born into you. No returns. No exchanges.
You are always in my thoughts. When you were little, I knew your whereabouts at any given moment. Now that you are…off on your own, I still always know where you are, because I keep you in my heart.
I don’t hold Travis anymore, of course- not to read to him, or for any other reason, either. I wish I’d known that the last time was going to be the last time.
I cried until my eyes swelled shut, and then I slept, a black, dreamless sleep from which I awoke amazingly refreshed, at least until I remembered.
Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.
He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the good place, and a heart-shaped leaf lay trapped in the hollow if his throat as though it were planned, though of course it was so perfect it couldn’t have been planned.
I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.
I turn off the radio, listen to the quiet. Which has its own, rich sound. Which I knew, but had forgotten. And it is good to remember.
Life comes with problems, you have to accept that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything.
This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.
If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.
The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.
…wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want.
This is the way things work sometimes, that good things get ideas from each other, say, well now let’s go ahead and let her have it all.
When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.
Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.
I think it’s a real gift to be able to say that what’s in your life is enough. It seems most of us re always wanting more.
We are assumed to be rather hopeless — swallowed up by incorrect notions, divorced from the original genius with which we are born, lost within days of living this distracting life.
Are these real diamonds?” I once asked, and she said, “Why have them if they’re not?
I would make an anonymous call and say, this is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?