The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

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

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

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.