I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

I love the smell of a new book, but I prefer inhaling fresh bottles of ink and glue. They get me more lightheaded – unless I read the book.

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive.

Flying in his dreams was an exhilarating, breathtaking experience, sometimes literally, that tended to leave reality wanting, like riding a roller coaster compared to mowing the lawn.

It feels good to turn on the TV and have options, a variety. That's why television is so good.

What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.

I do think that we are an overmedicated society.

Treasure is uncovered by the force of flowing water, and it is buried by the same currents.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.