why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

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.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf