A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

Our global economy is much more fragile than many of us realize.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.

I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.

I never fall in love.

Deeply earnest and thoughtful people stand on shaky footing with the public.

The moment someone asks you to do something you don’t have the time or inclination to do is fraught with vulnerability.

The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

I’m giving all that I have in this life. I’m opening up my notebook, and I’m saying everything in there out loud.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

I was raised in a family where vulnerability was barely tolerated: no training wheels on our bicycles, no goggles in the pool, just get it done. And so I grew up not only with discomfort about my own vulnerability, I didn’t care for it in other people either.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

I guess if I’m a product, either you’re chocolate, you’re vanilla or you’re butterscotch. You can’t be all three.

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

If you think dealing with issues like worthiness and authenticity and vulnerability are not worthwhile because there are more pressing issues, like the bottom line or attendance or standardized test scores, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. It underpins everything.

Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit; your machine can be taken over totally.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.

Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Consider a tree for a moment. As beautiful as trees are to look at, we don’t see what goes on underground – as they grow roots. Trees must develop deep roots in order to grow strong and produce their beauty. But we don’t see the roots. We just see and enjoy the beauty. In much the same way, what goes on inside of us is like the roots of a tree.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

I have a theory about the human mind. A brain is a lot like a computer. It will only take so many facts, and then it will go on overload and blow up.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

Faith minus vulnerability and mystery equals extremism. If you’ve got all the answers, then don’t call what you do ‚faith.‘

I think our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted. It means engaging with the world from a place of vulnerability and worthiness.

Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Of course I get hurt.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I’ve laid my friends bare.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.

We’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Persistence is to the character of man as carbon is to steel.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.