Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.

How you spend your days is how you spend your life.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.

But enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.