How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
You can’t test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality.
In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.
We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.
You can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials with god, or you can live as a particle crashing about and colliding in a welter of materials without god. But you cannot live outside the welter of colliding materials.
Under her high brows, she eyed him straight on and straight across. She had gone to girls’ schools, he recalled later. Those girls looked straight at you.
There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.