At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

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.

Why do I spend every moment with you thinking about why I did not go in the opposite direction when I had the chance?

Both were military. That was clear.Reacher could tell by their haircuts. No civilian barber would be as pragmatic or as brutal.

Emily was feeling the elation of conscientious hosts when they can temporarily escape a ubiquitous houseguest.

By the power invested in me by the state of New York and the Universal Life Church, I now pronounce you husband and husband. You can kiss the groom.

Guys ask me, 'Why are you always smiling?' Are you kidding? I'm in the NFL, that's why!

Some say his droppings have been found as far north as York, and that he has a full size tattoo of his face, on his face. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

There's a certain amount of what I wear that I wear for irony.

Do you feel better?” I asked Sam as he opened the door to the Volkswagen for me. “Yes,” he said. He was still a terrible liar. “Good,” I said. I was still a fantastic one.

Call'd to the temple of impure delight He that abstains, and he alone, does right. If a wish wander that way, call it home; He cannot long be safe whose wishes roam.