On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

No one escapes the wilderness on the way to the promised land.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

As a life's work, I would remember everything - everything, against loss. I would go through life like a plankton net.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

According to Inuit culture in Greenland, a person possesses six or seven souls. The souls take the form of tiny people scattered throughout the body.

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

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

The dedicated life is worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

I love a book that makes me cry.

You know...they say an elephant never forgets. What they don't tell you is, you never forget an elephant.

I've just become quite fixated on the idea of calmness and peacefulness somewhere, someday.

Rap music is just computerised crap. I listen to Top of the Pops and after three songs I feel like killing someone.

To militant Islamists, the expulsion of the Soviets was just the prelude to purging the entire Islamic world of infidels.

America's foreign policy lacks the backbone to do the right thing in Afghanistan - which is leave.

Pain only matters when it happens to someone important.

It was not important how many enemies there are, but where the enemy is

The ability for a group of people to do remarkable things hinges on how well those people can pull together as a team.