Life

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

So many broken children living in grown bodies mimicking adult lives.

In her daydreams, they aged miraculously, she still trim with a blond ponytail, standing next to her strong, tall husband with his thick, curly dark hair and straight white teeth. Money was never an issue.

Life is choice. All day, every day. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It's as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. So when I'm observing, that's what I'm watching for. The choices people make.

The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.

The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.

Fat men take a cushion with them wherever they go.

Yeah, to me, acting is very therapeutic. I get out a lot of anger and frustration.

Be busy with your free life.

I just wasn't one of those girls who dreamt of her wedding day and the birth of her first child.

I like gardening - it's a place where I find myself when I need to lose myself.

Charlie started crying, in the convulsive, soundless way that men do. 'Don't you understand,' he said after composing himself, 'that's a funeral dirge for the first wave.' We all thought about that, the many lives lost before we even opened our eyes this morning.

Torque was the greatest thing in the world, as far as Lina was concerned.

We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

My belief that everyone is a person, no matter what they’ve done, and that taking a human life is wrong.

Survivors can't always choose their methods.

O Life! Thou art a galling load Along a rough a weary road to wretches such as I.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

I've done so many bad things in my life but the stars always forgave me.