I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

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.

Those who spend all they earn always end in penury.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

We ask our volunteers, "Do you work here?" They say, "Not yet."

The same as real life, there is no happily ever after.

God stands ready to allocate his power to all who are radically dependent on Him and radically devoted to making much of Him.

Where you thinke there is bacon, there is no Chimney.

That's the case with these exponential technologies; our brains, they struggle with it. We live in a world that is global and exponential, and our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local.

I am still learning and experiencing things and feel like I cannot state a truth. So I guess one truth I know for sure is that I cannot state one. A paradox.

It's not that hard to say slavery is wrong after we've abolished it.

Being home is like a vacation to me, so I'm trying to get my home together.