The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
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 find ashes.
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
Ecstasy, I think, is a soul’s response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.
We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
You can’t test courage cautiously.
I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
We live in all we seek.
You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.
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.
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.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.