Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.
Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child’s toy Slinky.
Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.
Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.
I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.
Doing something does not require discipline. It creates its own discipline – with a little help from caffeine.
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.
The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.
I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one.
Write as if you are dying.
The creatures I seek do not want to be seen.
The interior life is often stupid.
The way to learn about a writer is to read the text. Or texts.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.
The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.
The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge.
I work mornings only. I go out to lunch. Afternoons I play with the baby, walk with my husband, or shovel mail.
The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature.
Whenever an encounter between a writer of good will and a regular person of good will happens to touch on the subject of writing, each person discovers, dismayed, that good will is of no earthly use. The conversation cannot proceed.
Painters work from the ground up. The latest version of a painting overlays earlier versions, and obliterates them. Writers, on the other hand, work from left to right. The discardable chapters are on the left.