A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
Spend the afternoon, you can't take it with you.
Now the thing is no longer a vision: it is paper.
I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and reco...
I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonshingly cheap...
A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lio...
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings.
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and fin...
In short, I always vowed, one way or another, not to change. Not me. I needed the fierceness of vowing because I could scarcely help but notice..that it was mighty unlikely.
I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again
Children...wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride,; they wake like people brought back from cardiac...
But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with...
Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a showe...
When I was fifteen, I felt it coming; now I was sixteen, and it hit. My feet had imperceptibly been set on a new path...there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it, or about anything. I was going to...
We don't know what's going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered...