The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.
It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
Take the time to write. You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.
Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.
Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.