“The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of thems...”

“If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.”

“I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.”

“To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.”

“Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and start...”

“Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.”

“A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”

“[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“Nothing forces us to knowWhat we do not want to knowExcept pain”

“Doesn't it seem that it is always by chance that these things happen, or is it because of the generosity of a shared knowledge of suffering that allows for it?”

“Wisdom is not making life any harder than it has to be.”