All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

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.

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

The first draft of anything is shit.

Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong with them. Everyone is extremely hard to live with.

My parents would not permit ugly language in the house, which was okay with me. I didn't want to learn German anyway.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...

Health is a matter of choice, not a mystery of chance

We all have different athletic strengths, but I bring a mentality, a physical toughness, an attitude, that they do not have, that helps me with the athleticism.

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.

I have searched frantically for contentment for so many years in so many ways, and all the acquisitions and accomplishments- they run you down in the end.

The pathway to enlightenment is joyful. It may sound harsh. I suggest just the opposite. It is rather easy compared to the possibilities of staying in pain and illusion.

The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.