“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
“The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.”
“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.”
“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
“Does anything eat these plants? Does anything eat the things that eat these plants?”
“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.”
“There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.”
“We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.”
“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.”
“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
“You were made for this, to give voice to your astonishment.”
“Push it. Examine all things intensely and relentlessly.”
“Ecstasy is an overflowing awareness of creation, a vivid realization of the poet’s dictum that the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
“It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny.”
“Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing.”
“You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader’s arms, like a drunk, and say, ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting.'”
“What can any artist set on fire but his world?”
“The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel.”
“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”
“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”
“The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.”
“You don’t 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.”
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
“What you see is what you get.”
“We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.”
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.”
“The present is holy ground.”
“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”
“Write as if you were dying.”
“The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home.”
“We live on mined land.”
“Books sweep us away to their worlds. They don’t merely entertain us; they teach us how to see.”
“When you write, you lay out a line of words.”
“Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
“The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.”
“What would you do differently if you could live your life over again?”
“It is the unexpected that changes our lives.”
“Be ignited, or be gone.”
“The painter can no more imagine a world without light than the writer can imagine a world without words.”
“You must go at your life with a broadax.”
“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”
“Who will teach us to live deliberately?”
“The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.”
“We cannot pretend that the world is not on fire.”
“The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega.”
“We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.”
“The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind.”
“All the world is a flame.”