I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.

Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

In literary history, generation follows generation in a rage.