Why do you go and build a monument to a man who sends electricity through a wire? Does not nature do that millions of times over? Is not everything already existing in nature? What is the value of your getting it? It is already there.
Our entire life, with our fine moral code and our precious freedom, consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
We have for too long accepted a traditional way of looking at nature, at nature’s creatures, which has blinded us to their incredible essence, and which has made us incomparably lonely. It is our loneliness as much as our greed which can destroy us.
There is no shame when one is foolish with a tree No bird ever called me crazy No rock scorns me as a whore The earth means exactly what it says.
Given that all religions preach brotherhood, love of your fellow man, and tolerance for all people without exception, why is it that all the world’s different religions have never been able to achieve unity?
It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth — and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it — because there is nothing in the world around us that supports our choice.
Idle dreamers have given true visionaries a bad name.
Do everything that you want to do, but always pick up the bill afterward.
The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. . . . I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.
Do you suppose I consider your miserable fiddle when the spirit seizes me?
I believe in miracles in every area of life except writing. Experience has shown me that there are no miracles in writing. The only thing that produces good writing is hard work.
The business of the poet and novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
All things are God’s grace . . . everything in the world and the very world itself.
Writing is simply the writer and the reader on opposite ends of a pencil; they should be as close together as that.
She’d teach them [her children] these things are nothing, the clothes, toys, and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she’d teach them, even . . . all your dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying. . . . Always choose love over safety, if you can tell the difference.
What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us.
