No, the point is not only does time fly and do we die, but that in these reckless conditions we live at all, and are vouchsafed, for the duration of certain inexplicable moments, to know it.

At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting

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

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

What is a house but a bigger skin, and a neighborhood map but the world's skin ever expanding?

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.