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?

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]

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.

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.

If we chose to refuse irony, we risk becoming irony's dupe.

Neglect your art for one day and it will neglect you for two!

He who harms living beings is, for that reason, not an ariya (a Noble One); he who does not harm any living being is called an ariya.

As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.

In France that is the one rule, never make trouble.

You,” I said, “are sweet music in a distant room.

When I was a kid, people who got divorced were people who had no gumption.

If I had been a dog walker, I would have been the most successful dog walker in Paris.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.