"My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way."

"Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you."

"If you don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young."

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

"Stand firm when justice demands it, even if you stand entirely alone. A lesson woven into the fabric of human history."

"The moment that you feel that just possibly you are walking down the street naked...that's the moment you may be starting to get it right."

"Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom."

"It is a quiet truth that time is the most impartial judge; it reveals all pretenses and rewards all patience — an essential principle for the reflective life."