"Honey, are you being safe?''I wear my seat belt, yes.''Does this Rob Lovely wear a seat belt too?'Matty sighed. 'Mother, seat belts should be worn at all times when in a moving vehicle. Didn't you teach me that?''So long as we're both talking about condoms here, then I'll leave it.''Consider it left."

"I was woken by a shell-burst in the trench of sleep. Heart skipping, with eyes fighting light, my thoughts sprang up like a field of starlings startled by a farmer's gunshot, a thousand separate, autonomous specks that swirled into a single united black shape."

"In life, there are dreary, empty days and there are exciting, full days. You will experience both, for you cannot choose one above the other. May your full days be many."

"A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves."

"Maybe it’s not good trying to answer the question ‘What is my purpose in life?’ Maybe the better question is: ‘How can I make someone’s life better TODAY?"

"In my civilian world at home in Los Angeles, half the people I know are on antidepressants or anti–panic attack drugs because they can’t handle the stress of a mean boss or a crowd at the 7-Eleven when buying a Slurpee."

"Life is indeed a storm and while there are times you can sit and watch from the safety of a window pane there are moments you need to grit your teeth and take on the wind and the rain."