Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.
What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world’s surface and exit through it.
I have since only rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
I couldn’t unpeach the peaches.
I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.
It’s a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Does anything eat flowers. I couldn’t recall having seen anything eat a flower – are they nature’s privileged pets?
Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.
The way you live your days is the way you live your life.
Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can’t think about them. I live with trees.
A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.
Are you living just a little and calling that life?
We still and always want waking.
Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.
You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world’s hard work.