“Ein Foto muss nicht immer technisch perfekt und ein Meisterwerk sein. Das Leben ist es ja auch nicht und trotzdem finden wir es wundervoll.”

“I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And Yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it”

“Life keeps throwing me lemons because I make the best lemonade…”

“To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream’s ‘everything’s fine.”

“The workings of the male mind are twisted indeed.” Winnifred Crane”

“The best discoveries always happened to the people who weren’t looking for it. Columbus and America. Pinzon, who stumbled on Brazil while looking for the West Indies. Stanley happening on Victoria Falls. And you. Amy Curry, when I was least expecting her.-Roger Sullivan”

“Invisible things are the only realities.”

“But my point, you see is that death is misunderstood. The loss of one’s life is not the greatest loss. It is no loss at all. To others, perhaps, but not to oneself.”

“It was not sympathy in the ordinary sense which he [Adolf Hitler] felt for the disinherited. That would not have been sufficient. He not only suffered with them, he lived for them and devoted all his thoughts to the salvation of those people from distress and poverty… his noble and grandiose work, which was intended ‘for everybody’…”

“I’m the kind of boy that can fall in love with any girl because I love with the heart, not the eyes.”

“I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity”, must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (“gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.”

“We are each what never leaves us, what we never seethe back ofis the self. But what loves usis at the back, as Eurydice wasescorting him outwithout his knowing.”

“Autumn is the time of year when Mother Nature says, “Look how easy, how healthy, and how beautiful letting go can be.”

“Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money.”

“(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, ‘How do I make a living from this?’ It’s a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well – but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of ‘why am I writing’ and ‘what am I saying’ and ‘how do I keep it honest.”