I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.
Write about winter in the summer.
Last forever!? Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.
We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.
According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.
We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind, nature’s old song, and dance...
Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.
I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
The world is wider in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.
He judged the instant and let go; he flung himself loose into the stars.
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.
It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.