“It was a lesson the world had already taught me and was teaching me still. You don't know what's possible until you actually see it.”

“It is an obvious fact that you can never look ahead with clarity at your own future or anybody else's. You can't know what will happen until it happens. Or maybe it dawns on you the split second be...”

“By concentrating on what I was grateful for, I was able to stave off despair.”

“I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for ...”

“What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves”

“Something happens when you are alone most of the time, when there are no distractions. Your mind grows more powerful--muscular, even. It takes over and starts to carry you.”

“I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.”

“I felt like a failure, like somehow my self-worth was tied to my ability to procreate. I didn't feel like I could talk about it. I did not want other people's pity, so I mostly kept my story and my...”

“My failures may be my greatest successes. It is in failure that I have often drawn closer to God, learn to depend more on Him than myself, gained self-knowledge, and seen things in their right pers...”

“I am not saying that Hitler was a choir boy. But I am saying, let him who was innocent in the Second World War cast the first stone.”

“Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.”

“Pride is ugly. It says, 'If you succeed, I am a failure.'”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”