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.

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

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.

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.

As an artist, her imagination isn't fettered by the constraints of reality.

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve been gone, but you have to move on. If not today, then someday soon.I love you, Ryden, I will always love you, but I’m not here anymore.

Where would Jesus be if no one ever wrote the gospels?

View other authors as your allies rather than your competition

I'm leaving because I want to spend more time with my wife in Chicago.

There is no debate among any statured scientists of what is happening. The only debate is the rate at which it is happening.

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

My biggest advice for women writer/directors is to always be attempting to make work that avoids pandering to the conceptions that the industry has put in place for "women directors."

There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.

Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.