Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.
You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
God gave me a talent to draw. I 'owed' it to him to develop the talent.
I'm a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.
The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.
Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.
Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.
I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.
I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.
We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
Johnston's books are beautifully written and among the funniest I have ever read.
If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order - willed, faked, and so brought into being.
There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
When you write, you lay out a line of words. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.
For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.
When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.
Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.