I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

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

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" "No", said the priest, "not if you did not know." "Then why, " asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?

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

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, " then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

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

Innocence is a better world.

When we lose our innocence - when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there's death in the pot - we take leave of our sense.

No, that I love you. I love you, Isabel Marie Nichols, and I have since the first day I watched your golden blonde hair dance in the sunlight. That day, you became mine.

His loyalty, so fierce and unwavering, makes my eyes water and heart ache.

[On being told by a horse show spectator that she looked like Princess Anne:] I think I'm a bit better-looking than she is.

Old age is a time of humiliations, the most disagreeable of which, for me, is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.

The cinema that interests me departs from realism.

When I wear a really nice and classy dress out, the papers never print it.

Our compassion and acts of selflessness take us to the deeper truths.

For all-around, everyday, all-season wear, farmers can't be beat. They are inclined to chafe under the burden of leisure (a minor vexation on the farm), but they thrive on neglect and adversity.

I especially worry about the ways Canadians can be glib about our supposed difference from the US in our "acceptance" of "diversity."

Persuasion is not a science but an art