It's amazing the way one can take a step ten and a half miles long and still always land in a cowpat.
Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.
I think it is time for a new pride in the intellectual life, and a new impatience with people who take pride in ignorance, or somehow use "elite" to mean "person who has taken the time to know" and then are eager to dismiss, say, striving, or the notion that improving one's self out of difficult conditions is a noble thing.
The thing I've discovered that is a help is that there isn't a simple virtue or a simple vice. They're always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded. . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
For the most part I'll probably do floor exercise and balance beam. Those are the two things that I do.
The search of knowledge is an obligation laid on every Muslim.
He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.
I learned jazz; that comes from blues. I learned rock; that comes from blues. I learned pop; that comes from blues. Even dance, that comes from blues, with the answer-and-response.