How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
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. But the stars neither require nor demand it.
Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” Priest: “No, not if you did not know.” Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?
The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.
There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself – in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love – and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it.
Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit.
The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. … how to set yourself spinning?
Get to work. 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.
So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened.
At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]
If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No”, said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?
What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we’re blue.
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.
I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes its operating in midair.
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.
She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.
Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.
Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep.
Lou asked point-blank, Can love last? (Rural people get to philosophizing, and will say anything.)—Oh, darling! No, not that heart-thumping passion. Give that eighteen months. But it’s replaced by something even better.Lou waited.—Lovers!
I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.
The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
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.
It could be that God has absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem.
Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.
The silence is not suppression; instead, it is all there is.
I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).
I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.
If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither “declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs,” then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.
I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.
On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.
I alternate between thinking of the planet as home – dear and familiar stone hearth and garden – and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.
I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?
The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.
The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said “It is the trade entering his body.
When we lose our innocence – when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot – we take leave of our sense.
The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
In literary history generation follows generation in a rage.
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.
The notion of the infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one; in complexity are the fringes of beauty, and in variety are generosity and exuberance.
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.
There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.