We also write to heighten our own awareness of life... We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection... We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it...to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely... When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking... I feel I lose my fire and my color.

I was stirred only like a leaf in the wind, that is all. . .

The value of the personal relationship to all things is that it creates intimacy and intimacy creates understanding and understanding creates love.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

This great handsomeness I took into myself later when he desired me, but I took it as one breathes air, or swallows a snowflake, or yields to the sun.

The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.