Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

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.

Now, go get inspired!

Don't write your child's pages. Turn them with love.

Never cut loose from your longings.

Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest.

Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.

People see you onstage and the glamorous side, but they don't see you traveling 600 miles a night, eating truck stop food and spending by yourself staring at walls.

I want to take retirement rather than feel as if it's taking me unawares. Maybe even seize it joyously. But at least behold it without looking back so longingly that I turn into a pillar of regret.

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

The globalization of the capital market is actually part of economic globalization. This will create a change in the entire world economy, not just restricted to some fields in some countries.

Belief and seeing are both often wrong.