“I will try to give thanks for gifts strangely, beautifully, painfully wrapped.” – Rebecca Wells

“We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It’s a messy business, life. It’s hard to figure – full of surprises. Some good. Some bad.” – Henry Bromel

“I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.” – Randall Jarell

“Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.” – William Blake

“If you listened hard enough the first time, you might have heard what I meant to say.” – Anonymous

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.” – Barry Lopez