Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.
The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.
Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?
The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
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.