Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

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.

Nobody loves me but mama, and she may be jivin too.

When a human awakens to a great dream and throws the full force of his soul over it, all the universe conspires in your favor.

And she was well-enough acquainted with loneliness to understand that the worst part wasn't having nobody caring for you - it was having nobody to care for.

She shot him a look she thought he might still remember, the same one a rattler gives right before it strikes.

They don't know what poor is. They don't know that poverty is a sharp knife carving away at you. They don't know what it does to the body. To a mind.

Romance novels could teach a man a thing or two, if he was smart enough to open his mind and really see.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money.

Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue.

There isn't much political coloration in my economic writing; it's not surprising that few people know my political views. They really aren't very important.