Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.
I saw in a blue haze all the world poured flat and pale between the mountains.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. A net for catching days.
We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.
Admire the world for never ending on you – as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been.
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
God gave me a talent to draw. I ‘owed’ it to him to develop the talent.
As a life’s work, I would remember everything – everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.
A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
I’m a housewife: I spend far more time on housework than anything else.
You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins.
It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator, our very self-consciousness, is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution.
I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one’s mind.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist – only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.
I can’t dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can’t do anything anymore.
No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.