Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.
Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.
I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.
The mind itself is an art object ... The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline - with a little help from caffeine.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.
I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn't recall having seen anything eat a flower - are they nature's privileged pets?
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.
At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.
Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.
I had good innings, as the British say. I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.
We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song, and dance.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you can see the work's possibilities.
'Fecundity' is an ugly word for an ugly subject. It is ugly, at least, in the eggy animal world. I don't think it is for plants.