There's no one with intelligence in this town except that man over there playing with the children, the one riding the stick horse. He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child's play.

We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance

There was a point in my 40s when I went into the bathroom with a bottle of wine, locked the door, and said, 'I'm not coming out until I can totally accept the way that I look right now.'

When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less.