I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

The creative process obtains in all creative acts. So if I'm painting suddenly I'll see something that I didn't see before.

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

As a thinker I keep discovering that beauty itself is as much a fact, and a mystery...I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy.