A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.

To live in this world you must be able to do three things:

My mother was young, only I noticed too late.

I am good and bad and you will never forget me.

Copenhagen has eyes like a watchful animal

The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.

I didn't intend to start thinking about God,

Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs.

I wrote a pep talk recently to myself on a bar napkin: no matter which road you take, it will be both glorious and unbearable. Every road is lonely. Every road, holy. The only error is not walking forth.

But being unable to choose becomes its own choice. When you don't decide, a decision still arrives.

I'd hurry back to this life, the one where you are standing beside the open window looking drowsy and beautiful, a half-eaten pear, in your left hand. What? You ask, handing me the other half.

It's almost cruel, he laughs. He After everything, how the world still insists on being beautiful.

I worry that I love poetry too much. And sleep. And Paris. And how, right now, my body is still just my body — with no one else's footprint.

They say men want freedom and girls want love, but I've seen women leave lovers and countries and kingdoms of comfort just for the chance to sleep unbothered, to bathe unwatched, to waltz around apartments all their own, wearing nothing but lipstick the color of desire.

One day you're sitting alone at the bakery and the next, you're standing across from the ocean and the next, you're crying at the movies and after that, you're planting fruit trees and learning street names and bringing in the mail and kissing someone's delicate face. You suddenly realize you've slung together something called a life. The word home drops out of your mouth like a ripe summer pear plopping in the backyard. Sticky at the edges. Heavy with sweetness.

I would like to touch the world and not harm it. I would like to be touched and not harmed.