The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn't merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.

There aren't many irritations to match the condescension which a woman metes out to a man who she believes has loved her vainly for the past umpteen years.

Men often compete with one another until the day they die. Comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.

True solitude is a din of birdsong, seething leaves, whirling colors, or a clamor of tracks in the snow.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

If two people are in love they can sleep on the blade of a knife.

Many people have believed that they were Chosen, but none more baldly than the Texans.

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?

Still, it’s really frustrating me that there doesn’t seem to be anything in my closet that’s appropriate to wear to an exorcism.

I wish I could just accept that I'm not that good and not be shy about the fact that I'm not that professional.

The studied, unquestioning pace of my family irritated me.

Love is an act of imagination. For some of us, it will be the greatest creative triumph of our lives.

power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.

Every conflict is emblematic of the throwaway culture.

I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it.

There is a magic in some books / That sucks a man into connections / With the spirits hard to touch / That join him to his kind.

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

On a moonlit night, after a snowfall, or under cherry blossoms, it adds to our pleasure if, while chatting at our ease, we bring forth the wine cups.