Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

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.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

ALL words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine from them in some remote part of Wales?

It was hard to know how to play the game when the rules kept changing.

You've got a beautiful country with so many beautiful people and so many beautiful things happening and stuff like that lets it down. I feel sad for them.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

We try to magnify the difference between Americans and the English. In real life they like the same music and dress the same. It's really much more similar than anyone thinks or how we show it.

No one ever went broke by taking a profit.

I can be arrogant, I can be insufferable.

I heard this album as finished, I heard it in dreams . . . It was like the revelations of John the Baptist or something.

I have tremendous faith in theuniverse. I feel at home on this planet. Even though it's a very big world out there, I plan on walking right through the middle of it unharmed.

One cannot resist an idea whose time has come.