Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World

You're every street I've ever walked. You're the tree outside my window, you're a sparrow as he flies. You're the book that I am reading. You're every poem I've ever loved.

You matter more to the universe than you will ever know.

Stories were living inside us. I think we were born to tell our stories. After we died, our stories would survive. Maybe it was our stories that fed the universe the energy it needed to keep on giving life. Maybe all we were meant to do on this earth was to keep on telling stories. Our stories—and the stories of the people we loved.

I thought he was only going to teach me how to swim in the waters of this swimming pool. Instead, he taught me how to dive into the waters of life.

Mom, why didn't anybody tell me that love hurts so much?" "If I had told you, would it have changed anything?

Cowards start wars, and the brave fight them.

The world would be a better place if everyone did more thinking and less talking. There might be a lot less hatred.

Sometimes you’ll feel the loneliness of exile. And sometimes you’ll feel the happiness of belonging.

If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

Sometimes I think that I’m nothing but a lot of emotions all tangled up in my body and I don’t know how to untangle them.

To live and never to understand the strange and beautiful mysteries of the human heart is to make a tragedy of our lives.

My father traced his name on my heart. And his name will remain there. And because his name lives there, I will be a better man for it.

I'm sorry that the world is what it is. But you'll learn how to survive - and you'll have to create a space where you're safe and learn to trust the right people. And you will find happiness.

He was like a heart that was beating in every pore of my body. His heart was beating in my heart. His heart was beating in my head. His heart was beating in my stomach. His heart was beating in my legs. His heart was beating in my arms, my hands, my fingers. His heart was beating in my tongue, my lips. No wonder I was trembling.

Everything is connected and everything belongs. Everything that is alive carries the breath of the universe.

No one asks to be born. And no one wants to die. We don’t bring ourselves into the world, and when it’s time for us to leave, the decision will not be ours to make. But what we do with the time in between the day we are born and the day we die, that is what constitutes a human life. You will have to make choices—and those choices will map out the shape and course of your life. We are all cartographers—all of us. We all want to write our names on the map of the world.

We didn't need to talk. Because we were discovering that the heart could make music. And we were listening to the music of the heart.

There was something about girls that guys didn't have and would never have. They were amazing. Maybe one day, instead of always having to prove they were real men, guys would study women's behavior and start acting a little more like them. Now, that would be awesome.

You're the rain and you're the desert and you're the eraser that's making the word “loneliness” disappear

Don’t ever let the hate rob you of the life you’ve been given.

Happiness. Sorrow. Emotions are fickle things. Sadness, joy, anger, love. How did the universe think to invent emotions and insert them into human beings?

You could run and run—so long as you came back home again.

I wondered if I was strong enough or good enough to love a world that hated me

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that war is something beautiful or heroic. When people say war is hell, war is hell.

So much of me died. It took me a long time to feel alive again. Life, Ari, can be an ugly thing. But life can be so incredibly beautiful. It’s both. And we have to learn to hold the contradictions inside us without despairing, without losing our hope.

You taught me how to swim in stormy waters--- Then you left me here to drown

You don’t get extra credit for doing what you’re supposed to do.

Love took you out of exile and carried you to a country called Belonging.

We’re a country of immigrants that hates immigrants. Only we pretend not to hate immigrants.

But when I’m old, I don’t want to be asking myself if my life mattered. Because if I was just a decent guy, if I had just been a good man, then my life would have been a good life.