“... the story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale, the German kind, unsweetened by Disney.”

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it."STATE OF WONDER”

“I missed my mother's father. Is that even possible? Maybe I had fallen asleep for a while. Maybe I was like her, just waking up and looking for him to be there. I wondered how it would have changed...”

“Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.”

“The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.”

“It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in ...”

“For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer fo...”

“In times of trouble, turn to God.”

“Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you've had a bunch of bad days and there's different ways you can deal with it and the way I dealt with it was I just turned co...”

“You may not remember the time you let me go first. Or the time you dropped back to tell me it wasn't that far to go. Or the time you waited at the crossroads for me to catch up. You may not remembe...”

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”