I couldn't unpeach the peaches.

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

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

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 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.

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.